The Port of Vancouver’s path to sustainable growth will be built on investing heavily in rail improvements, paying attention to India’s economy and persuading voters to support new taxes for freight-mobility projects, according to trade experts who spoke during a conference in Portland this week.
With consumer confidence stabilizing and U.S. manufacturing beginning to recover, “it’s starting to bounce back for us,” David Sanborn, senior port consultant for New York-based Moffatt & Nichol, told attendees of the Northwest Intermodal Conference held Tuesday and Wednesday. However, Sanborn said, a lack of rail and highway improvements will hamper any return to economic growth. “We’ve deferred a lot of what we’ve needed to do with infrastructure in almost all cases,” Sanborn said.
One slow-moving project in Clark County drew attention from experts: The multibillion-dollar Columbia River Crossing. Current plans for the project include a 10-lane replacement for the twin three-lane drawbridges over the Columbia, four miles of freeway improvements on both sides of the river and the extension of Portland’s light-rail transit system into Vancouver.
Michael Pasha, general manager of port development for The Pasha Group, a California-based logistics firm, said completion of the bridge-replacement project would make the Port of Vancouver — and the region — more attractive to companies, including his own.
‘Create fluidity’
Three years ago, Pasha said, he talked to Port of Vancouver officials about shipping Chrysler cars through the port. Instead, his company secured an agreement to ship the cars through the Port of Grays Harbor — a direct competitor to the Port of Vancouver — precisely because the Grays Harbor port already had the capacity and infrastructure in place to accommodate the deal.
“We’d like to see the new bridge project,” Pasha said, “to create fluidity.”
Larry Paulson, executive director of the Port of Vancouver, said the port couldn’t strike the deal with Pasha Group in part because it had to scale back expansion plans after voters in August 2007 defeated a $78 million, six-year tax levy. The levy was intended in part to develop land to accommodate more car shipments. “We can’t handle it all,” Paulson said, adding that there were other opportunities for the port to pursue.
On the issue of investing in rail to speed freight, the Port of Vancouver is moving in the right direction, experts said. In fact, rail increasingly is becoming a faster and more cost-effective method of moving freight than trucks, which face traffic-clogged roads and slow delivery times, experts at the conference said.
One example of the port’s focus on rail is its $137 million plan to complete the West Vancouver Freight Access project by 2017. The project is intended to enable faster movement of trains in and out of the port. A piece of that project — the $14 million Terminal 5 rail loop — is scheduled for completion in mid-June. “We are trying very hard to build a niche port that is primarily rail,” Paulson said.
While China continues to present opportunities, experts said, India is coming on strong as a reliable market for automobiles. Kraig Jondle, vice president of sales for Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics, a global shipping firm, said the first U.S. imports of trucks from India are expected to arrive by the end of this year.
Looking to China
Paulson said he’s aware that India is moving into the car market, but “we haven’t really looked at that seriously.” What is more important to the Port of Vancouver is the emerging market in China for green energy, Paulson said, which the port plans to capitalize on.
“China is now getting into the business of manufacturing wind-energy components,” he said, noting the port’s import cargo already includes wind turbines.
During the conference in Portland, trade experts said new taxes for freight-mobility projects are politically unpopular because many voters don’t realize they create jobs. That’s a public perception that needs to change, they said. Paulson said regional studies show that roughly 51 percent of Clark County workers’ jobs “are in some way tied to movement of freight, whether it’s local, domestic or international.”
