Diverting rail cash to ports needs planning Scott hasn't considered

[thelakelander]

Good editorial in the Orlando Sentinel.

Mike Thomas
COMMENTARY
March 1, 2011

Gov. Rick Scott says forget the sleek, lightning-fast trains.

Bring on the gigantic, plodding cargo ships instead.

Scott went on CNN on Sunday to argue that Florida would be better off using ObamaBucks to expand our ports than build high-speed rail.

Backing that up, the Florida Chamber of Commerce says better ports could bring us 143,000 new jobs.

If ports are so great, how come Scott isn't putting any state money or any long-range planning into them? And this is classic chamber double-speak, talking about the need to invest in the future while at the same time glomming on to the latest scheme to slash taxes for its members.

The love affair with ports comes from the expansion of the Panama Canal. In 2014, it will be able to accommodate the growing fleets of super-sized container ships from Asia.

Right now, these monster ships unload on the Pacific coast. From there, the goods are put on trains and hauled across the country.

The expansion will allow the big ships to come into the Caribbean. Some will unload their cargo onto smaller ships that will go to ports in Latin America and the Gulf coast. Tampa should be a big winner. Some of the big ships will swing around Florida and continue traveling to ports along the East Coast.

The problem is that they require 48 feet of water to float, whereas most ports are between 40 feet and 42 feet deep.

This has states from Florida to New York scrambling for dredging projects to deepen their ports to get in on the action.

Among the Florida ports lining up for dredging are Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Jacksonville.

Doing all of them would cost almost $1 billion. The selling point is that this would make Florida a regional transportation hub for Latin America and the Eastern United States.

If only it were this easy.

Stuck down in the far corner of the United States, Florida hardly is a central location for delivering goods across the East. This is particularly true for Miami. Nor is Florida positioned to become a regional shipping hub for Latin America, given the intense competition from other ports in the Caribbean.

This makes deepening all three Florida ports a highly speculative venture. Miami has taken the lead in getting its dredging project under way, but Jacksonville probably is better situated with a better rail network.

You might think that would concern a governor so worried about building things that could burden taxpayers.

There also is a consistency problem here.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is in charge of dredging. But Florida's ports are not in the Corps budget. Putting them in the budget would require a congressional earmark.

Rick Scott is on the record as opposing congressional earmarks.

Dredging also is only a small part of the cost of readying the ports. They would need docks, cranes, rail lines, roads, storage facilities, etc. All this would cost a few billion. And the feds don't cover these infrastructure costs.

And there is this: Right now, as part of an expansion at the Port of Tampa, a connector road is being built to dump trucks directly onto Interstate 4 from the port. As cargo traffic increases at the port, I-4 is going to get a lot more congested.

"If you have high-speed rail, and move people onto rail system and get cars off road, that frees up space for trucks,'' says Richard Wainio, director of the Tampa Port Authority. "One tends to support the other.''

Has Scott considered the impact that expanding the Panama Canal will have on Florida roads?

Investing in ports is worthwhile.

Instead of paying dockworkers, rail workers, truck drivers and so on in California, Chicago and Atlanta to bring us our goods, we can pay Florida workers. The energy use and carbon footprint of shipping goods through the canal is much smaller than shipping them across the country by rail.

The problem is this requires investment and planning, not a convenient sound bite on CNN.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/columnists/os-mike-thomas-rick-scott-ports-0301120110301,0,5852057.column