By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

The battle royal over the right to build a new container terminal in Jasper County has taken a new turn.

Jasper County officials and their private industry partner, Seattle-based terminal operator SSA Marine, have charged that the S.C. State Ports Authority awarded a contract for engineering work on the site only to get a sweetheart deal on data originally generated to further Jasper County’s own long-planned terminal there.

“While it’s for others to decide whether what they did is legal or fair, this certainly is yet another example of the ports authority doing everything it can to hijack our project,” said Jake Coakley, Southeast regional vice president for SSA Marine.

Byron Miller, spokesman for the SPA, said the decision to award a $330,000 contract to S&ME, a Raleigh, N.C.-based company, was nothing of the kind.

“We want the work done quickly and as inexpensively as possible,” he said. “The bottom line is S&ME is a quality firm and we like their approach.”

The firefight was stoked shortly after the contract was awarded July 15. Advocates for Jasper County’s right to develop the port obtained a copy of an e-mail sent by a ports authority official that suggested S&ME’s proposal was accepted because it had already collected a large amount of data on the specific port site, was willing to give that data to the authority at no cost and would require a rather modest payment to do additional work on the site.

The data concerns soil conditions on the site and the criteria for preparing that soil to support a cargo container terminal.

Other proposals for the analysis, all of them requiring much more extensive fieldwork, could have cost the SPA more than $1 million, port officials said.

However, the data S&ME is willing to share was collected nearly six years ago while the company was working as a subcontractor under a $200,000 contract with SSA Marine, Coakley said.

Officials with S&ME could not be reached for comment.

SSA has a contract with Jasper County to build and operate a port terminal on land owned by the state of Georgia on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River. That makes it party to a series of ongoing legal battles between the county and the SPA over control of the proposed $600 million project.

Coakley, who’s been in the port industry since 1968, said he’s never seen anything like the situation transpiring in Jasper County. But when pressed about the data sharing, he admitted there’s likely nothing the company or the county can do about it.

“I’m not a lawyer, but as best as I can determine, the contract, which was with Berger/ABAM Engineering and not S&ME directly, states that the final report on the land belongs to us, but the work data, the working papers and so forth, belongs to them,” he said. “If that proves to be true, then S&ME can share it with anyone they want.”

Still, Coakley said, the situation angers him.

“We contracted for this work in early 2001 to determine which of five prospective sites within the targeted acreage would best support a port terminal and which held the greatest risk of simply collapsing into the river,” he said.

The sites, all of them on land currently used for the disposal of dredge material, had been identified by the South Carolina Coastal Council in 1987. Coakley said the site SSA eventually settled upon was initially its least favorite of the five, but the soil studies conducted by S&ME were convincing.

“But that was after eight months of work,” Coakley said. “Now all of a sudden, in 2006, the ports authority miraculously wants to put a terminal on the same piece of land.”

Jasper County Administrator Andrew P. Fulghum said the county was not party to the Berger/ABAM contract.

“As a result, there’s nothing we can do about the situation other than to use it to show that the ports authority has no plan, no money and no real intention to develop a port here,” he said. “Our contention from the start of this long, drawn-out confrontation is that they’ve done none of the due diligence work themselves, and they simply want to condemn the land to prevent competition.”

Coakley holds an even harsher view.

“The reality is the S.C. State Ports Authority has been completely flat-footed in regard to developing this land as a terminal. If they had intended to do it, they would have done it,” he said. “The reality is I think they’re just trying to hold on to their power in a vastly changing port culture.

“The business model that’s taken hold around the world is one in which one entity owns the land and then leases it to a company like ours to operate a port facility on it. While the rest of the world is changing, the ports authority is clinging to a system of port management from another era.”

Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.

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