By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

The nation’s new U.S. Maritime Administrator is calling on Charleston and the nation’s other top 10 ports to embrace the concept of a national port strategy to successfully parse the ever-growing challenges of moving more cargo through land- and infrastructure-constrained ports.

“The reality is ocean-going cargo vessels are getting larger, the ability to handle the larger volumes they carry is getting more difficult, and we’re not moving fast enough to deal with congestion in our road and rail systems,” Sean T. Connaughton said prior to a recent aerial tour of the Port of Charleston.

While ports have historically been viewed as job generators and critical benefactors of the local economy, Connaughton said the nation’s respective ports authorities and port-related businesses need to put aside their understandable focus on local challenges and adopt a national mindset regarding the movement of cargo.

“The Port of Charleston and the other eight facilities I’ve visited since taking this job five months ago are the gateways of our national economy. Port issues aren’t only about Charleston or Long Beach, Calif., or Hampton Roads, Va. These are issues of national significance,” he said.

Appointed Maritime Administration commissioner by President George W. Bush last October, Connaughton immediately declared his top priorities were easing port congestion, encouraging investment in transportation infrastructure and increasing America’s presence within the global maritime and transportation marketplace.

Since then he’s been traveling to the nation’s top ports to learn first hand of their challenges and how they’re addressing them.

He’ll complete his tour in early March with a visit to the Port of Savannah. But based on what he’s seen to date, he said one thing is very clear. No matter where the port is located, its challenges are the same as its counterparts: dealing with congestion and competing land uses that have straitjacketed their abilities to grow.

“As recently as the 1980s, ports still had the ability to buy more real estate and create more terminal space,” he said. “Since then, communities like Charleston have become tourism meccas that have also seen an explosion of residential and mixed-use development.

“Ports are losing out to residential development and tourism, and once you lose the land for port expansion, you lose it forever.”

Connaughton studiously avoided answering questions regarding the current controversy surrounding the S.C. State Ports Authority’s plan to build a new cargo container terminal at the former Charleston Naval Base.

But he did say that concerns about whether the analysis done for a planned port access road went far enough to address regional transportation issue “reinforces the need to take a more global approach to these issues.”

In some respects, the challenge facing Connaughton is almost as steep as that facing the ports.

M. Nuns Jain, South Atlantic regional director for the U.S. Maritime Administration, said unlike other agencies, the USMA has limited regulatory authority over the shipping and port industries and therefore must act as a facilitator, urging and cajoling those who would ultimately have to buy into a national port strategy to come to the table and talk about it.

Connaughton said that while others will play a large part in determining what a national strategy should be, the recent Heartland Corridor Project undertaken in the states of Virginia, West Virginia and Illinois is a good example of what he’d like to see.

The project reworked and revamped the major rail corridor linking the Virginia Ports Authority’s facilities with Chicago, with much of the work taking place on tracks in West Virginia, hundreds of miles from where cargo comes ashore.

Although he’s new to his post, Connaughton’s job will end when Bush leaves office. By then, he said he hopes his effort lead to a national strategy included in the reauthorization of the Merchant Marine Act in 2009.

“To do that, we need to come to grips with the fact that this is a matter of national importance and gather everyone around the table to talk through solutions,” he said. “I hope that by the time my appointment ends, we’ll have gathered enough momentum to keep the process going without me.”

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

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