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Carolinks: The other inland ports
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
A sudden surge of inland port proposals followed the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the announced closure of several military bases, said Robert Harrison, deputy director of the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Texas, Austin.
Some of the projects have been successful, but most have not.
The Alliance
The Alliance, an inland port outside of Fort Worth promoted by H. Ross Perot and his son, H. Ross Perot Jr., through their Hillwood Development Corp., is one of the most successful inland ports in the country. It has grown into a city on 15,000 acres about 24 miles west of Fort Worth, Harrison said.
Perot and his son hit pay dirt with the project when they negotiated a deal with the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad to build a cargo transfer station there.
Today the yard handles approximately 660,000 TEUs of cargo. A single TEU is equivalent to one 20-foot cargo container. In comparison, last year the Port of Charleston handled a record 1.98 million TEUs.
Hillwood began building distribution centers for major retailers and started courting Fortune 500 companies to serve as anchor tenants. Today, Alliance is home to facilities for 125 of these companies.
When workers began to complain about the commute from suburbs of Dallas and Fort Worth, the Perots built affordable housing, parks and retail stores, and then the Texas Motor Speedway got built there, Harrison said.
Kelly USA
Not as successful as Alliance is Kelly USA, located in San Antonio. Although it has landed 35 commercial businesses, such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Pratt Whitney, and created about 5,000 jobs in the process, its success has come at a proportionately higher public cost than has Alliance’s.
Where Alliance can justifiably claim that only a small portion of its capital costs were covered by public funds, with roughly $300 million out of a total $6 billion invested in the project, Kelly USA has depended on forging public/private partnerships from the start.
“Not that that’s a bad or even an unusual thing,” Harrison said. “Most people involved in these things have an idea but no money. What they and others in their position have done is look to investors to help.”
Virginia Inland port
Perhaps the most noteworthy and successful inland port east of the Mississippi River is the Virginia Inland Port at Front Royal, a facility much like the one being proposed by Carolinks in South Carolina.
Like the proposed inland port here, VIP was created to provide support to a large marine facility, in its case, the Port of Virginia at Hampton Roads/Norfolk.
Operated as a surface-based intermodal container transfer facility, VIP provides an interface between truck and rail transport of ocean-going containers to and from the coastal port.
Created in the mid-1980s, the main purpose of the inland enterprise in Virginia was to capture a larger market share in areas in the Ohio Valley region. According to the Virginia Ports Authority, the 161-acre facility not only has fulfilled that early objective, but is also making an operating profit.
The VPA said 95% of the business moving through the Front Royal facility has been from new customers rather than from historic users of the coastal port.
New York port network
One public/private partnership that appears not to have fulfilled its original promise is New York’s Port Inland Distribution Network. The idea was not dissimilar to what Carolinks has proposed.
Like Carolinks, the state was depending on barges to transport goods from the Port of New York and New Jersey, which has few growth opportunities, to smaller ports in Albany, N.Y., Bridgeport, Conn., and Harrisburg, Pa.
From there the cargo could be sent on by rail to distribution centers farther inland without imposing any more traffic on the New York metropolitan area.
“In and of itself, the plan had all kinds of logic to it, but in February, the state of New York pulled the plug on subsidizing the barge service because the expected customers just never materialized,” Harrison said.
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