JaxPort Dredging Fiasco?

[Captain Zissou]

The Jacksonville industrial sector is doing quite well, both in terms of vacancy and rent growth.  That said, I can believe that Savannah's port is breaking farther away from Jax.  Savannah is a huge strategic growth opportunity for the whole state of Georgia while Florida splits its expenses between a number of ports and leaves Jacksonville competing with South Florida.

[thelakelander]

Not surprised at all. Savannah is more strategically positioned and funded. Same goes for Charleston and Norfolk. We'll always play second fiddle to them. There's still economic opportunity playing second fiddle though, so not all is lost.

[BridgeTroll]

I would think Savannah long and skinny river channel would be a disadvantage compared to Jaxport... they must have dredging issues also...

[Jagsdrew]

I was in Savannah this past week and the amount of cargo ships (and cargo) that flow in and out of their port is far, far more than ours. They are, I think, the 4th busiest port in the US.

Only thing we compare to their port is access to a major interstate.  They have a deeper channel, more cranes to handle cargo to get the ships offloaded and loaded with containers, suspension bridge has more vertical clearance than ours so overall they are going to get the new business that is available.  They are handling ships with over 10,000 TEUs with ease.

[thelakelander]

I would think Savannah long and skinny river channel would be a disadvantage compared to Jaxport... they must have dredging issues also...

Deeper river, no statewide competition for funding, better positioned for shipping goods into the south and midwest.

[BridgeTroll]

Clearly they need to dredge... so much opposition to dredging here but they decided long ago that the opportunities and advantage of dredging far outweigh the opposite...

Dredging is part and parcel to having a seaport... they ALL dredge.  Stop the hand wringing and get on with it...

[jaxlongtimer]

Clearly they need to dredge... so much opposition to dredging here but they decided long ago that the opportunities and advantage of dredging far outweigh the opposite...

Dredging is part and parcel to having a seaport... they ALL dredge.  Stop the hand wringing and get on with it...

BT, you continue to overlook the issues with dredging starting with environmental damage to the river (which is also an offsetting economic issue), increased storm flooding and potentially a very weak business case as a result of issues noted by others when comparing JaxPort to Savannah or other competitors.  An approach to dredge at all costs is absurd.  It should only be done when it is clear that the benefits clearly offset the costs.  In the opinion of many, its the opposite conclusion, that the costs far outweigh the benefits.  If so, any rational person would not have authorized this most recent dredging.

If Savannah, as our nearest significant competitor, has advantages over JaxPort that cannot be overcome, for whatever reason, then we should focus on what we can do that fits the circumstances we have here.  Everyone knows not every port can be a "super port."  It appears we may have already lost the game to be such a super port so why keep pursing it at great costs?

[BridgeTroll]

Not "overlooking" anything.  How presumptuous of you. I  simply don't share your level of concern regarding environmental impacts of dredging vs advantages... The mouth of the St John's has been dredged repeatedly over many decades... and will likely continue for decades to come.

Apparently you do not have the same environmental concerns for the Savannah river... 

[jaxlongtimer]

Not "overlooking" anything.  How presumptuous of you. I  simply don't share your level of concern regarding environmental impacts of dredging vs advantages... The mouth of the St John's has been dredged repeatedly over many decades... and will likely continue for decades to come.

Apparently you do not have the same environmental concerns for the Savannah river...

There are limits to everything.  How deep do we dredge before you say enough?  Environmental damage and storm surge increase with every dredge.  And, what advantages are there if the port fees don't cover the costs (the real proof of economic viability) and/or the ships they are dredging for don't show up as projected for whatever reason?

As to any other port dredging impacting the environment, I would have similar concerns.  I don't have a full time job monitoring such ports but that doesn't mean that I don't have the same concerns.  How presumptuous of you!

[BridgeTroll]

Viability?  If you want viability you better get modernizing and dredging... yesterday.  Ships aren't going to get smaller and there aren't going to be fewer of them.  More and bigger...

https://www.cato.org/commentary/americas-ports-problem-decades-making

The Jones Act and the Foreign Dredge Act (which requires barges transporting dredged material to be Jones Act‐​compliant) dramatically raises the cost of dredging U.S. ports—dredging that they need to accept more, bigger, and fuller ships. Heritage's Nick Loris elaborates:

The depth and width of the shipping channels determine what size and how many vessels can travel through a shipping channel. Even a seemingly small amount of additional depth to accommodate the weight of a larger vessel exponentially creates value. Just one inch of water depth results in the ability to import and export millions of dollars' worth of more cargo. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "With one more inch of depth in a port, a cargo ship could carry about 50 more tractors, 5,000 televisions, 30,000 laptops, or 770,000 bushels of wheat."

The lack of depth in many shipping channels also forces bulk carriers to "light load," or carry less than a full load, because they cannot travel with full loads at existing depths. Because light‐​loading is inefficient, it increases transportation costs per unit of good transported—and consequently raises prices for U.S. exporters. If a port cannot accommodate a larger, heavier ship, that cargo ship will divert to a deeper port first.

[jaxlongtimer]

Viability?  As discussed herein, it is not just about the depth of the river.  It's also about our competitors' assets and abilities, how much actual demand there really is for such infrastructure and our own limits, such as our geography and the height of the Dames Point bridge and power lines, that will cause us to fall short of the stated goals.  Again, all to be factored in with financial, environmental and storm related offsets.

There clearly is not demand for a dozen or more of these Panamax ports so why have so many?  Indications are we are not going to be one of the ports that makes the cut and we need to be honest about that.

[BridgeTroll]

Hmmm... shorter trip up the river to the port... confluence of I-10 and I-95... major railway hub... those sound like advantages rather than limitations. Power lines... big deal... dredging easy... bridge height is an issue to be overcome.

[jaxlongtimer]

Didn't take long for Nate Monroe to find the next "authority" scandal. 

Now it's JaxPort and the power lines as I highlighted almost a year ago in starting this thread.  The plot thickens and, ironically, it involves JEA once again.  Port officials backroom dealing, spinning and maybe lying -echoes of what happened at JEA.  And, no transparency as they try to cover their tracks.  One would have thought they would have learned a lesson from JEA.

My position:  If the Port can't pay for its own needs with user fees paid by for-profit companies using the port, why should the taxpayers?  The user fees are the best indicator of the economic value that is derived from the improvements and if the fees don't cover the cost or more for the improvements then clearly the ROI isn't there and the improvements are not worthy of being done.

These agencies also need to learn that once they lose credibility on an issue, they are likely going to lose that issue too.  Why can't they be upfront and candid with the public they are supposed to serve?  Special interests in charge once again.

[Emphasis added]

Nate Monroe: U.S. Army Corps contradicts bumbling JaxPort officials in feud with JEA

COMMENTARY | The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has not decided whether a series of high-voltage JEA transmission lines crossing 175 feet above the St. Johns River must be raised, an agency spokesperson told the Times-Union this week, notably contradicting months of assertions made by Jacksonville Port Authority officials amid an increasingly bitter conflict with the city utility.

JaxPort is scrambling to put punishing political pressure on JEA to capitulate to its demands that ratepayers in Duval, St. Johns and Nassau counties finance a risky, complicated, multi-million dollar project to raise the transmission lines — something both Army Corps and port officials said for years was unnecessary even as they embarked on a high-profile project dredging the river to attract larger and larger cargo ships to Jacksonville.

The port has done a complete about-face, however, and has been unsuccessfully applying behind-the-scenes pressure to a succession of JEA leaders to raise the lines, having come to the conclusion the ships they hope to see calling on JaxPort once its 47-foot dredging project is complete will need more air clearance after all.

Bizarrely, after the port advocated the opposite view for years, JaxPort CEO Eric Green now characterizes the transmission lines as a near-existential threat to his agency's future.

He and his colleagues are furious their secret talks with utility leaders have never resulted in an agreement, going as far as making an appeal to Gov. Ron DeSantis this month to intervene in the impasse. This week, port board member Jamie Shelton also revealed he has asked the city's Office of General Counsel to determine whether it can use its extraordinary power to issue a binding legal opinion to resolve the conflict — presumably one that would force JEA customers to pony up for the port's project.

In their desperation, however, JaxPort officials have overreached.

JaxPort has often put the Army Corps at the center of its argument about the transmission lines: The federal agency, port officials have repeatedly told city and state officials, has told JEA the lines "must be raised to eliminate any unreasonable obstruction of the free navigation of the St. Johns River."

It might be a compelling argument but for a simple problem: It's not true.

"The district is presently discussing the matter internally and has requested additional information that will be assessed before formulating a position or decision," an Army Corps spokesperson told the Times-Union.

Agency officials "don't have a target date for when a determination may be made."

That unhurried posture is a remarkable departure from the kind of frenzied, desperate appeals JaxPort has made, and it directly contradicts the port's efforts to cast JEA officials as rogue actors brushing off an immediate safety issue in the river.

In fact, it was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that issued the permits decades ago allowing JEA to build the towers and hang the lines across the river at their current 175-feet height, and that permit remains valid. Those six powerlines — ranging between 138,000-230,000 volts — are critical pieces of JEA's electric system, and moving them is not just costly but risky: A failure could lead to blackouts in large parts of the city.

Port, Army Corps had no problem with JEA lines

It's hard to understate how dramatic a reversal it would be were the Army Corps to formally require JEA to seek a new permit for more air clearance, as the port wants.

In its lengthy study of the 47-foot dredging project in 2012, the Army Corps definitively concluded neither the powerlines nor the Dames Point Bridge posed air clearance issues for the ships most likely to call on JaxPort following completion of the deepening project.

The Army Corps and JaxPort stood by those findings for years, even as they were challenged in federal court in 2017 by the St. Johns Riverkeeper, the local environmental watchdog.

The Riverkeeper warned U.S. District Judge Marcia Morales Howard that the Army Corps failed to adequately study the air-clearance issue and theorized that failing was deliberate. In truth, the group said, the Army Corps punted on the question to keep the cost of the dredging project artificially low to help it qualify for federal funding under a cost-benefit formula used by the government. Including the costs of raising the powerlines and the bridge, the Riverkeeper alleged, would have turned that calculation "upside down."

The local dredging project's standing to qualify for federal funding was already marginal even with the pared-down project, so there was little room to include such necessities like powerlines and environmental mitigation — for which the Army Corps had originally budgeted tens of millions of dollars before abruptly changing course and effectively zeroing it out (the major driver of the Riverkeeper's frustration).

Still, the Army Corps and JaxPort stood by their assessments: The powerlines were just fine where they were.

The same year the Riverkeeper filed suit, in 2017, the Jacksonville City Council was weighing whether it would help fund the dredging project, and council members wanted the port to offer a full accounting of the true costs: Would there be more pieces coming down the road that would cause headaches later? The city had been burned repeatedly in the past by hidden project costs that only emerged after fronting an initial investment.

The JEA lines specifically came up during those discussions.

"As far as we're concerned, impacts down the road, maybe," a JaxPort spokeswoman said about JEA's transmission lines in August of that year. "Right now, the largest ships will be accommodated at Blount Island quite nicely."

That view was apparently short-lived: The port has recently dated its discussions over the powerlines to be about five years old, meaning the agency was in federal court and in the court of public opinion arguing one thing while pushing for something markedly different in behind-the-scenes talks with utility leaders.

Recognizing this awkward dissonance, the port settled on a new argument: The lines don't need to be raised because of the dredging project, per se, but because they might one day pose a navigational hazard to a hypothetical ship of hypothetical measurements that hypothetically could be interested in calling on the port.

That is a novel conception of a "navigational obstruction," at least as far as any reasonable person might think of one. An obstruction is something like a sunken vessel in the channel — something abruptly placed in the way that shouldn't be. But a piece of massive infrastructure permitted by the Army Corps that has been in place for decades? JaxPort might consider that a limitation — and perhaps it's one that, at JaxPort's own cost, could be removed — but a limitation isn't an imminent danger to vessels navigating the waterway.

JaxPort's duplicity doesn't end with dredging lawsuit

It's not clear where JaxPort officials came up with the idea that the Army Corps has demanded JEA raise its lines, but it's a talking point the agency has repeatedly invoked.

Shelton, the JEA board member, told DeSantis in a letter earlier this month the federal agency had "advised" JEA the lines were an "unreasonable obstruction."

In a draft memorandum of understanding drawn up late last year, intended to help spur JEA to begin the project, metadata show a JaxPort official struck language offering an accurate summary of events — that the Army Corps had been merely notified about the results of a study on the lines — and inserted in its place a line that the Army Corps had "notified" JEA the lines "must be raised," precisely the thing the agency spokesperson contradicted this week.

That falsehood was also repeated a few years ago by former JEA executive Herschel Vinyard, who had been working on an undisclosed plan to raise the lines for the port. In a particularly odd episode, Vinyard handwrote a proposal on paper committing the utility to raising the lines, asserting the Army Corps said such a thing was necessary (the statement was no truer two years ago than it is today, a spokesperson told us at the time).

Vinyard texted photos of the proposal to his executive assistant to type up.

The result was an undated, unsigned policy paper appearing to commit JEA to doing what Green had been pushing for, and it took some time for utility officials who came along after Vinyard — who was pushed out amid a reckoning following the controversial tenure of CEO Aaron Zahn — to figure out the mysterious document's origins.

The port's obfuscations don't end there.

In a bid to seek a quick end to the fight, the port now wants the city's Office of General Counsel to weigh in. The city's charter gives OGC the power to issue binding legal opinions to resolve disputes between agencies — so theoretically the office could resolve this in the port's favor.

But there is no legal dispute between JEA and JaxPort for OGC to resolve.

The legal issues are between JEA and the agency that granted JEA the permit to hang the powerlines across the river: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. If the Army Corps decides the lines must be raised, JEA has legal remedies available to challenge that, if it so chooses. But it's only the Army Corps that gets to make that call. The port is merely a spectator in that process.

The dispute between JEA and JaxPort is one of policy and of politics, and those are areas in which OGC does not get to pick winners and losers.

The policy issue the port is advocating is that JEA should voluntarily agree to raise the lines — "voluntary" because its current permit remains valid unless or until the Corps says otherwise. On top of that, the port wants JEA to voluntarily agree to pay for the project.

That is hardly the reasonable middle ground cash-poor JaxPort has claimed it's seeking: It's an entirely one-way deal — and one the port has tried to strike in behind-the-scenes negotiations that could cost ratepayers across Northeast Florida tens of millions of dollars. The port's frustrations those secret talks have dragged on too long smacks of tone-deafness: The public has never been engaged to weigh in on this important policy consideration, and the port has, until recently, only reluctantly and timidly acknowledged what it's been up to.

JaxPort is seeking to have no skin in the game on its own gambit.

The port doesn't even seem certain how high it wants JEA to raise the lines. Some documents reference 197 feet; others 205 feet; others still 215. The Port of Savannah, which has utterly crushed JaxPort in competition for years, has clearance of 185 feet; it's hard to imagine Jacksonville's beta-port really needs more than alpha Savannah to thrive.

All four come with different price tags, ranging between $30-40 million or considerably more.

Despite all this duplicity, JEA officials have generously offered voluntarily asking the Army Corps for a new permit to raise their power lines, absorbing the risk and providing the port the policy outcome it is demanding. JEA leaders have simply drawn a redline on using ratepayer money to finance that project.

Now that is a bargain JaxPort ought to jump at.

Nate Monroe is a metro columnist for the Florida Times-Union. His column regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.

https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/columns/nate-monroe/2022/03/31/nate-monroe-u-s-army-corps-contradicts-jaxport-jea-feud-high-voltage-lines-st-johns-river/7226391001/?utm_source=jacksonville-News%20Alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=news_alerts&utm_term=news_alert&utm_content=FLORIDA-JACKSONVILLE-NLETTER01

[jaxlongtimer]

More on the JaxPort growing fiasco... maybe turning into our next scandal:

John Baker, former Port board member, now on the JEA board, sides with JEA, while, as Monroe points out, the Port stews in its own contradictions, or as he calls it, lies.

Nate Monroe: With collapse of shell games, JaxPort loses its leverage in fight with JEA

COMMENTARY | An influential member of the JEA board of directors said Tuesday he stands behind the utility's CEO in refusing to use ratepayer money to finance an expensive and risky project Jacksonville Port Authority officials have long demanded: Raising the height of six high-voltage transmission lines that cross the St. Johns River.

John Baker, a former member of the port's board of directors and a current member of JEA's board, said he was sympathetic to the port's plight and agreed the lines needed to be raised, otherwise, the $410 million project deepening the river from 40 to 47 feet would "literally be wasted."

But, he said, "I think (JEA CEO Jay Stowe) has been very steadfast and very correct in saying JEA's ratepayers should not be paying for it."......

https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/columns/nate-monroe/2022/04/05/nate-monroe-jaxport-loses-leverage-jea-feud-over-power-lines-st-johns-river-florida/9469430002/?utm_source=jacksonville-News%20Alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=news_alerts&utm_term=news_alert&utm_content=FLORIDA-JACKSONVILLE-NLETTER01

[MusicMan]

They don't pay Nate Monroe enough. Where would we be without him?

Also we got one thing Savannah does not>>>>>>>>>>>>>>  The Jaguars!


Dredging for dredging sake is a bad idea.