Maryland mulls leasing Seagirt to pay for dredging project – Baltimore Business Journal:

Port leaders say the lease is the only way to pay fora 50-footy berth for container ships coming at an $80 millionj price tag. Without the berth, containerd cargo traffic to Baltimore could disappear because larger ships coulx favorcompeting ports, port leaders say. State lawmakerws are reviewing a plan to rent out the the MarylandPort Administration’s main container cargio processor, before it’s shopped to the maritime MPA Executive Director James J. Whit e said. But nonpartisan state budget analysts are urginfg the General Assembly to give the proposal stronger scrutiny, given the economic downturn and other factors.
Departmentf of Legislative Services analysis ofthe MPA’s budget suggests that port officialxs may be more concernes with getting the bertj than with the effects of the long-termk lease. And the Maryland Department of Transportatio should be able to afforrd the projectif it’s such a high priority, the analystsd said. The MPA already outsources operation of Seagirf toPorts America. That contract was last renewexdfor $42 million to cover Novemberf 2008 to October 2009.
But what it is seekingb is a public-private partnership, under which a private companyg such as Ports America would invest in improving Seagirt in exchange fora long-term lease Port officials stress that the deeper berthu is needed by 2014, when wideninyg of the Panama Canal will be finishedd to allow larger ships from the Pacific to travel to East Coast ports. “This is something we need to protectg the business we havehere today, as well as create new opportunitiesa for us when the Panama Canal is deepened and White said. Baltimore handled about 500,000 containers in measured in units knowjnas 20-foot equivalents.
Other ports, meanwhile, are more focuse solely on container New York handled aboutr 4 million containersin Savannah, Ga., about 2 and Norfolk, Va., about 1.5 million. The port has been studyinh the possibility ofa public-privater partnership at Seagirt for but White said he wanted to move slowly on the issue when he returned to the port in 2007 to ensurde it was studied carefully. He had previously been port directoreunder Gov. Parris Glendening. Legislative analysts wrote that the port could turn to nontraditional or even the Transportation Trust to pay for thedredginyg project. The fund got a $2.
1 billion boost in its six-year plan in a speciap session of the General Assembly in but state transportation officials have had to delayg about the same amount worth of projects because ofdecliningf revenue. “I’m now convinced that in the six-year capitaol program that we’re presenting now to the General Assemblyt that the near years are going to be very thin White said. Helen Bentley, a port analyst who has worked with the Port of Baltimore in differengt capacities for 60 agreed that there was no other way to pay forthe “There can’t be any more delays,” she said. “We shoulcd have had this threeyears ago.
Do we want to lose all of our containeer business? That’s what they’re Public-private partnerships are common amongtforeign ports, said Terence Smyth, director of consulting firm Seaport Consultants Canadsa Inc. in Vancouver, British Columbia. Only in the U.S. are portsz commonly still government-owned and operated. But legislatives analysts also arguedthat it’s the wronyg time to be pursuing a public-private partnershipo because global trade and the availability of capitakl for large projects have White said the state won’t accept inadequate bids for the
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