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Ports of contention: Perceptions of a slump
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
For all the competitive back and forth between the ports of Savannah and Charleston, what really makes S.C. State Ports Authority officials bristle is suggestions that the authority is somehow a relic of trading past.
That was most recently the contention of Jake Coakley, Southeast regional vice president for SSA Marine, the Seattle-based company which is partnering with Jasper County in the hotly litigious battle to build a proposed port terminal on the Savannah River.
While the SPA has prevailed in court, the other side continues to wage a public relations battle on behalf of its cause.
Given how well the Port of Charleston is doing in holding its own against subsidized ports, SPA spokesman Byron Miller said it should be clear to observers that the authority is not in a state of decline.
“Still, in this industry, perception can sometimes be everything, and we have to do everything we can to make sure that perception does not stand,” he said.
One way the SPA is doing that is by taking every opportunity to highlight aspects of the voluminous legal record generated by years of litigation over the Jasper County.
One of the key documents the SPA has referred to of late is a deposition Coakley submitted early in the dispute in which he talked of SSA Marine’s plan to operate the Jasper County port by privatizing what is now a government function.
“The factors that have driven privatization, not just of ports but in all industries, are a lack of efficiency, which obviously isn’t a problem here, a lack of access to capital, cash-poor governments—again not a worry here because we are not government-subsidized—and a lack of productivity, again something that’s not a problem in Charleston,” Miller said.
“So we can knock down their rationale for this so-called privatization, but there’s more to it than that. The devil is in the details and this is a dramatic shift in the way things are done here. If this were to come to pass, the first thing we anticipate is the replacement of state workers by organized labor.”
Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.
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