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US infrastructure discussions - ports have a seat at the table

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With the President Trump's administration one year in, the talk has turned back to Infrastructure revival in the US, an important theme in 2016’s campaign season.

Importantly, the seaports clearly have a seat at the table, at the “America’s Infrastructure: Time to Modernize” conference held last week by the US Chamber of Commerce, a high profile business promotion group, in Washington, DC at a venue nearby to the White House.

Chairman of the American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA), Steven Cernak, who is also the CEO of Port Everglades, in Florida, prefacing his remarks, told the high level attendees (from the intersections of business and politics) that: “There is no greater ‘poster child’ for the dynamic need to invest in our nation’s infrastructure than America’s ports.”

Cernak, who started with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and then moved to Galveston, cited his experience in Port Everglades where close to $1.5bn of projects are planned or are underway. He also mentioned the 122.3m barrels of petroleum products and more than 1m teu of containers that move through the port each year, along with cruise embarkations of more than 3.5m passengers annually.

In this era of looming deficits and perennial shortages of government money for projects, the reality is that much of funding for the ports, and likely for the other infrastructure modes represented, will take the form of Public Private Partnerships.

Cernak explained that, “Ports and private sector partners plan $155bn in investments in the coming years. We have partnerships in place but we need the federal government to step forward and invest with us so that the private sector and local funding can be fully leveraged.”

He went on to delineate the big priorities for the AAPA in its efforts to inform and influence legislators in Washington, DC. These encompass an anticipated federal investment of $66bn, for freight and port related projects, over the next ten years, including funding for waterside and multimodal landside projects.

Additionally, the AAPA seeks funds that have built up through years of “Harbour Maintenance Tax” collections to be fully released to the US Army Corps of Engineers to support dredging and maintenance of deepwater channels. The balance, held in a Trust Fund, has been estimated to total $9bn.