Hand it over, says Jaxport
At Jaxport, the $5m received for harbour maintenance last year only allowed dredging of hot spots on the river
Ports in the US are pressing Congress to hand over a bigger portion of the money collected through the Harbour Maintenance Tax, to enable them to maintain infrastructure and facilities.
It is, he agrees, a bit like levying a road tax and spending nearly all of it on something else.
At present only $1.3bn-1.6bn of the $5.7bn Harbour Maintenance Trust Fund surplus is going back to the sector.
“What we would like to see is a larger sum on an annual basis from that fund to help maintain our port facilities,” says Mr Kauffmann. “Right now, if we are going to get out of this economic situation, we have to see our harbour facilities and infrastructure maintained and developed.
“We don’t believe there are sufficient dollars for the Corps of Engineers; in Jaxport, for example, we received about $5m last year for harbour maintenance. That only allowed them to do certain reaches on the river, what we call the hot spots; it didn’t allow them to do the entire length of the river, only where they have seen the challenges and silting.”
Because of lack of funds, the port is not able to maintain the entire stretch to the complete 40-ft authorised channel depth it would like to, says Mr Kauffmann – although, so far, the port has not had a problem using the whole length.
“There is a broader issue here,” he adds. “Maintenance is by definition maintenance of the existing channel depth and width. But as the expanded Panama Canal comes onstream, many ports need deepening. The argument is, why can’t all the money being collected for Harbour Maintenance Tax be fully utilised for deepening. This has been raised and the government is evaluating it.”
In a letter to the Committee on Appropriations earlier this year, American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA) president and chief executive Kurt Nagle wrote: “AAPA strongly believes that the HMTF should be fully utilised for its intended purpose of maintaining federal navigation channels and not for any additional uses.”
He said that lack of adequate maintenance dredging had become an acute problem on the Great Lakes and the East and Gulf coasts and called for legislation to ‘firewall’ the HMTF.
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