|
 |
Articles and Editorials |
|
|
PA and NY: A tale of two deepenings
March 28th, 2010
, http://www.philly.com/inquirer/business/homepage/2
New York, Philly: A tale of two dredgings
By Linda Loyd
Inquirer Staff Writer
Here is a New Jersey riddle: Why is what's good for the north not good for the south when it comes to deepening ports?
Political leaders embrace deepening to 50 feet the behemoth New York-New Jersey Harbor at a cost of $2.5 billion. Environmentalists, politicians, and two states overcame thorny problems with the contaminated dredge - and where to put it.
Yet, New Jersey is suing to stop the less-costly $300 million digging of the Delaware River channel to 45 feet, which began March 1.
Compared with the levels of dioxins, mercury, and PCBs that lurked in the North Jersey harbor, the Delaware navigation channel is practically pristine.
In the mid-1990s, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman put together blue-ribbon panels. Vice President Al Gore and the federal government brokered an agreement, and alliances were forged to deepen the harbor.
Political opponents say the biggest ships will not come to the Delaware River, that a deeper channel will not create more jobs and commerce. Gov. Christie, U.S. Rep. Rob Andrews, and state Senate President Steve Sweeney have joined with environmental opponents, and cite risks in stirring up the river bottom, threats to drinking-water supplies, and unwanted dumping in the Garden State.
But, there's more. Officials and experts interviewed say that New Jersey's beef is also about protecting port interests in the north, and that New Jersey elected leaders see the Delaware River deepening benefiting Pennsylvania more than the Garden State.
In addition, they say, politicians see more voters among environmental supporters than among the port and maritime workers in Camden, Gloucester City, and Paulsboro.
"In North Jersey, 269,000 people are involved in that port. There aren't that many jobs at risk in South Jersey around the ports," said Thomas Wakeman, research professor and director of a marine-systems center at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken.
That view is shortsighted, said Wakeman, who worked 13 years on dredging issues at the Port of Authority of New York and New Jersey.
With President Obama wanting to double U.S. exports in the next five years, Wakeman said, the ports of North and South Jersey should be working together. South Jersey has the space, the labor, and could receive goods for export from the Midwest.
Even New York questioned investing in its harbor deepening because much of the port is on the New Jersey side, until a New York Shipping Association study showed just as many New Yorkers had jobs tied to the port as did New Jersey residents.
The same is true in South Jersey. "It's a region," said Wakeman, who also ran dredging operations for the Army Corps in San Francisco. "People go back and forth to where the jobs are. Political boundaries are really passé."
Whitman, who stepped down as governor in 2001 to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said she assumes opposition to the Delaware deepening "is economic. There's a clear economic benefit" to deepening the New York-New Jersey port, whereas ports in Camden and South Jersey are much smaller.
Whitman's administration favored deepening the Delaware. "What benefited one really did benefit the other," she said.
Ports are competitive and New York-New Jersey "clearly knows" a 45-foot channel and container terminals on the Delaware River will affect their market share, said John Martin, national port economist in Lancaster.
"If you had deeper water, you could bring more container business into South Jersey," Martin said. "That clearly would be substituted from New York - not all of it, but there would certainly be an impact."
Robert Shinn Jr., commissioner of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection during the Whitman administration, and a proponent of harbor deepening then and now, said the Delaware's main navigation channel was fairly clean of contaminants.
And over the years, the annual maintenance dredge removed to keep the channel at 40 feet has been used for such projects as the Palmyra Cove Nature Center and as fill to build what is now the Susquehanna Bank Center in Camden.
Going five feet deeper will improve - not damage - recharge of the drinking-water aquifer in the Delaware River, Shinn said. The deepening will not harm oyster beds which are in shallower water, not the channel, he said. "Dredging, as it's done today, has much less impact than 20 years ago."
In 1997, the New Jersey DEP issued a federal consistency determination and a water-quality certification for the deepening. That agency now has the same environmental objections to the project as the Delaware Riverkeeper Network and the Sierra Club.
New Jersey's support waffled under Gov. James McGreevey, and later Gov. Jon S. Corzine.
And, in the mid-2000s, the board of the tristate Delaware River Port Authority - which runs the bridges and PATCO high-speed line, and was the original deepening sponsor - split along state lines over the deepening.
Political opposition grew about the same time increased cargoes started going to the New York port, said Martin. After a 10-day lockout of longshoremen, which shut down West Coast ports, importers looked for alternatives and began sending more cargo by ship, instead of rail, to the East Coast.
Ports of New York; Norfolk, Va.; and Savannah, Ga., were the beneficiaries. Distribution centers popped up along the southern New Jersey Turnpike, in Cherry Hill, and in the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre area, he said.
"All of a sudden, Philadelphia, if it had deeper water and a good container operation, could start cost-effectively to service a lot of markets in Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey now served out of the Port of New York and New Jersey," Martin said. "Philadelphia is very well-positioned to serve a significant market."
In 2002, the U.S. Government Accountability Office raised financial concerns about the economic viability of the Delaware River deepening. The Army Corps suspended plans and the project stalled. (A second GAO update is expected any day.)
Another turning point was a "tipping fee" local N.J. officials wanted, if the Corps were to open four additional dredge-disposal sites in Gloucester County, said Anthony DePasquale, chief of operations in the Corps' Philadelphia district.
The Corps said "we can't do that, it's illegal," said DePasquale. "So New Jersey opposed the project." The disposal sites were later dropped from the plan, when the anticipated amount of dredge was reduced from 26 million cubic yards to 16 million. But the opposition stuck.
New Jersey now wants updated environmental impact studies, and more testing. "It's a myriad of outdated information," said Suzanne Dietrick of NJ DEP. She says the river has elevated levels of PCBs, arsenic, and petroleum hydrocarbons near Camden, Philadelphia, and Wilmington.
But the contaminants can be managed, Wakeman said. "In the New York-New Jersey harbor, you've got a Superfund site for PCBs, for dioxins, and for mercury. It doesn't get much more contaminated than that."
The Corps says it has spent more than $10 million on studies and sampling of seven or eight sections of the river, as recently as 2005, and each time found the material consistent and acceptable to standards of the three states.
"We can't scientifically justify" spending more taxpayer money, DePasquale said.
In the mid-1990s, the North Jersey-New York port "more or less had a dredging crisis," said Bryce Wisemiller, acting chief of harbor operations for the Corps' New York district.
"The way it ultimately got solved was through the involvement of Vice President Gore. He brokered a solution, or a path to a solution."
Ocean dumping of contaminated dredge off North Jersey, which went on for decades, ended in 1997. Now, only dredge material deemed environmentally clean - about three-quarters of the total - can go to the so-called "mud dump" in the ocean about six miles off Sandy Hook, or to restore marsh islands and habitat in Jamaica Bay and create fish reefs, Wisemiller said.
About one-quarter of North Jersey dredge material is too contaminated to go in the ocean. It is mixed with Portland cement or fly ash, dried out, and trucked to use in landfills or "brownfield" industrial sites, most of them in North Jersey.
Some of the NY/NJ dredge has gone to South Jersey - 113,280 cubic yards to Bellmawr, in Camden County, and 178,672 cubic yards to a former Hercules chemical plant in Burlington County. And some went to Pennsylvania, to fill a coal mine in Carbon County, known as Bark Camp.
Tom Shea, project manager for the Corps' New York harbor deepening, said comparisons with the Delaware River deepening are "apples and oranges."
A key difference: The Corps owns the federal sites that have been used for decades along the Delaware where river-bottom material will be taken.
Another difference: the New York-New Jersey port authority is a single entity. On the Delaware, each state has its own port authority.
"You've got many more vested interests at play down there," Whitman said, "and it's harder to get an agreement because everybody has their own particular master."
Since deepening the river began March 1, Leo Holt, whose family operates Gloucester Terminals near Camden and Packer Avenue Marine Terminal in South Philadelphia, said he heard from shippers and the maritime community "that people are taking Philadelphia seriously. It is only because they see a place to park their ships.
"They say all politics is local. That's fine, but you don't have to kill the guy who comes in from the next parish. There are regional wins that are huge in all of this." |
|
|
