By Molly Parker
mparker@scbiznews.com
Published May 4, 2009

The S.C. State Ports Authority board is expected to hear details today of the staff’s final offer aimed at keeping Maersk Line’s business at the Port of Charleston. And the Danish company is likely to make a decision about its local operations within the next two weeks, said Sen. Larry Grooms, chairman of the S.C. Senate Transportation Committee.

“Maersk is quickly closing in on exactly their business plan for the East Coast, and a large component of what they do depends on what happens in Charleston,” he said.

The board was scheduled to meet in executive session via teleconference at 2 p.m., according to a public announcement the SPA sent out this morning. No public comments or debate were expected from the board, SPA spokesman Byron Miller said.

Miller declined further comment, saying he “cannot speak to the nature of negotiations with our customers.”

Maersk spokesman Dana Magliola said he would check to find out whether the company had any news to report, but he had yet to respond by early this afternoon.

Grooms: Decision coming
Grooms said he is confident a decision will come soon, perhaps in the next week or two.

The Republican from Bonneau said his involvement has been to help “facilitate conversations that have gotten us to this point so far.”

“I think the ports authority is very close to a final offer,” Grooms said.

After months of discussions between the parties, the SPA executive team has a proposal that says, “This is it, we can’t do any better,” Grooms said.

The meeting was scheduled because the SPA executive team needs “board approval on a final offer,” Grooms said.

“That way the Maersk board knows this is not just management talking, and that they may or may not be able to back it up,” he said. “What’s taking place is the final steps as to whether Maersk stays in Charleston or whether they will leave. What they do here affects what they do up and down the East Coast.”

Grooms said how Maersk reacts to the offer will have a profound impact on the Port of Charleston for years to come. The economy is forcing shipping lines to retool their business strategies, and Grooms said he believes the outcome will be similar to what airlines did 10 years ago when they consolidated lines into a hub-and-spoke model.

The negotiations among the SPA, Maersk Line and APM Terminals, the company’s stevedoring arm, have been ongoing since late December and have spanned two chief executives at the SPA. Former CEO Bernard Groseclose resigned in January, and John Hassell took over as interim director.

Longshoremen: ‘We’re excited about it’
On Dec. 18, Maersk Line — the SPA’s largest shipping customer and the world’s largest shipping company — announced that it would leave the Port of Charleston when its contract expires at the end of 2010.

At the time, Maersk blamed the International Longshoremen’s Association. The three local chapters of the ILA had voted late last year to deny Maersk’s request to operate from the Wando Welch Terminal’s common-user yard, a move that would have eliminated several dozen checker and clerk positions in exchange for work done by SPA employees.

Maersk is currently a licensed private operator, and that labor is therefore supplied by the ILA, according to an international labor agreement. Moving to the common-user yard would have been in violation of that agreement, ILA Local 1422 President Ken Riley had said. And the ILA’s national chapter issued a stinging rebuke of the company, saying it put workers “at the end of their corporate greed chain.”

Those acrimonious relationships seem to have dissipated.

Riley said Monday that the ILA has “watched from the sidelines” and has every indication the negotiations “are moving in the right direction.”

“It wasn’t about us to begin with, and it’s not about us now,” he said. “The people who have our contractual relationships are working it out, and we’re excited about it. I’m certain the offer will not negatively impact the ILA. If it was going to, we would be in the room.”

Until this year, Maersk was making more than 400 ship calls annually to the Port of Charleston and represented almost a quarter of the port’s container business.

The company has already moved its South Atlantic Express and WestMed services — representing a combined three ship calls per week — to neighboring states’ port terminals.

Reach Molly Parker at 843-849-3144.