QuoteThree times a week, ocean-crossing cargo ships with names like Maestro, Empire and Marvel steam up the St. Johns River, pass under the Dames Point bridge and dock at the TraPac terminal. There towering cargo cranes and a swarm of longshoremen unload steel boxes packed with consumer items bound for shelves in hundreds of stores.
The big ships calling on TraPac's terminal heralded a new chapter for Jacksonville's port. TraPac linked it to the fast-growing trade routes of Asia, forging a connection that port officials called a game-changer for the city.
"Our partnership is indeed the beginning of a great enterprise," a top executive for TraPac's parent company said at the 2005 groundbreaking at which his company gave a Japanese kabuki doll to the port as a gesture of the alliance with the Tokyo-based company.
A decade later, the pomp of that day has been replaced by the hard reality that TraPac's terminal, which opened in early 2009, is operating at a fourth of its capacity.
TraPac might not even stay at that site. The company is negotiating with the Jacksonville Port Authority about possibly leaving the 158-acre terminal and moving to a different authority-owned location. The high-stakes talks have created behind-the scenes tension as one board member wrote an email branding the agency's initial approach to the negotiation as "unorganized, reactive and non-strategic."
Ultimately, TraPac's future in Jacksonville hinges on JaxPort's quest to deepen the ship channel from its current 40 feet deep to 47. The $684 million project to do that would be the most expensive public works project in Jacksonville history.
TraPac has said for years that in order to stay long term in Jacksonville, it must have deeper water for the much larger cargo-container ships now in operation. But there is no firm timetable for when the first underwater scoop would occur, much less how to pay for it. Nothing can happen until a legal challenge to environmental permits gets resolved.
While Jacksonville faces all those obstacles, other Southeast ports are pursuing deeper water, too.
full article: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2016-04-30/story/port-authority-faces-roadblocks-quest-realize-its-potential