Around my part of the waterfront, I have the feeling New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo wants his legacy to include “infrastructure”, based on his 2016 pronouncements.<\/p>\n
His plans, announced in his annual State of the union\/budget message, peg the scope of projects at something like $100bn, to be paid for\u2026 well, readers can fill in the blanks here because that’s not been figured out yet.<\/p>\n
While Governor Christie, across the Hudson, may not be thinking in such grandiose terms, others around the country might be; infrastructure will be an issue in the 2016 Presidential campaign. All these numbers are staggering; I don\u2019t want ports to get lost in discussions of big grandiose projects.<\/p>\n
The folks at the American Association of Port Authorities, which represent a wide range of maritime gateways, has done a good job with their freight-centric campaigns, sung along to the tune of “Let’s Get Loud”. But the alternative version of noisy music may include creative applications, and softer renditions, of PPP concepts. Some finely tuned soft financial music, if you will.<\/p>\n
And different kinds of music will attract different audiences, and help ports find a proper place in the new discussions of infrastructure funding, which tend toward surface transport without a maritime flavour.<\/p>\n
I’ve often marveled at the complexity of port and other ship funding structures – with a project finance flavor – that I’ve written about (or crunched numbers in support of). Where ports are concerned, benefits or the payoffs from project funding, accrue all over.<\/p>\n
Consider that a nice chunk of Governor Cuomo’s plans (and those of other similarly minded leaders) would renovate existing bridges and tunnels. Connector roads and railways close to harbours have already found a place in public spending bills. In a few cases, private finance has joined in. So, let\u2019s move our sphere of influence a little further into the hinterlands.<\/p>\n
If private maritime interests like terminal owners – who are financially well grounded – can envision benefits from improvements further inland and convincingly represent them in financial models, then clever bankers may be able to work their financial alchemy in support of bridge repairers. Ports may find a way to inject themselves into infrastructure funding conversations that reach further away from the waterfront. So, yes, musically, strains of violin songs, played to a different financier audience (who might see an additional slice of funding), might just have a place in the port messaging.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
COMMENT: Ports need to be making soothing noises, not just loud noises, about their importance, writes Barry Parker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":9645,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-9644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-new-yorker"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9644","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=9644"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9646,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9644\/revisions\/9646"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9644"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=9644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}