The tax is collected from container importers, based on the value of the container contents but despite its name an overwhelming amount of the sums collected stays in the general fund of central government rather than going to ports and harbours, says Jacksonville Port Authority\u2019s chief operating officer, Chris Kauffmann.<\/p>\n
It is, he agrees, a bit like levying a road tax and spending nearly all of it on something else.<\/p>\n
At present only $1.3bn-1.6bn of the $5.7bn Harbour Maintenance Trust Fund surplus is going back to the sector.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we would like to see is a larger sum on an annual basis from that fund to help maintain our port facilities,\u201d says Mr Kauffmann. \u201cRight now, if we are going to get out of this economic situation, we have to see our harbour facilities and infrastructure maintained and developed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t 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\u2019t allow them to do the entire length of the river, only where they have seen the challenges and silting.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 although, so far, the port has not had a problem using the whole length.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a broader issue here,\u201d he adds. \u201cMaintenance 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\u2019t all the money being collected for Harbour Maintenance Tax be fully utilised for deepening. This has been raised and the government is evaluating it.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a letter to the Committee on Appropriations earlier this year, American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA) president and chief executive Kurt Nagle wrote: \u201cAAPA strongly believes that the HMTF should be fully utilised for its intended purpose of maintaining federal navigation channels and not for any additional uses.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2018firewall\u2019 the HMTF.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":8362,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-8361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-equipment"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8361"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8363,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8361\/revisions\/8363"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8361"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=8361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}