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SupportTheDeepening - Pa. lawmakers laud Delaware River dredging
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Pa. lawmakers laud Delaware River dredging |
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March 3rd, 2010 8:32am |
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A river depth of 5 feet divides Pennsylvania and New Jersey officials in a two-decades-long feud over the dredging of the Delaware River channel from 40 to 45 feet.
Partial dredging finally began Monday near Delaware City, Del.
On the New Jersey side, newly elected Republican Gov. Chris Christie, Rep. Rob Andrews, D-N.J., and other New Jersey politicians have vowed to continue legal challenges and political maneuvers to halt the 103-mile project, which includes 9 miles in Delaware County.
Pennsylvania leaders led by Gov. Ed Rendell say a deeper channel will mean more ships, such as huge oil tankers, can get to Philadelphia-area ports, creating more jobs. Other Democratic supporters of the project include U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, and U.S. Reps. Bob Brady, D-1, of Philadelphia, and Joe Sestak, D-7, of Edgmont.
Specter in a conference call Monday said he expected the project would be a “bonanza for the building trades” and create 125,000 jobs.
Specter worked to authorize the project in the Water Resources Development Act of 1992 and modify its authorization in a revised version of the act in 2000, according to a spokesperson.
He helped secure nearly $89 million, $77 million for construction costs and $11.7 million for the Army Corps of Engineers to study the project.
“This funding kept the project alive during the 16-year standoff between Pennsylvania and New Jersey, which prevented the project from moving forward,” said Specter press secretary Kate Kelly.
“With the start of the dredging, this is a long-term battle that began back in 1983 when Sen. John Heinz and I filed the first legislation to deepen the port from 40 to 45 feet,” Specter said. “It took until 1992 for the Corps of Engineers to come up with the program on cost efficiency and all during this time we have been working on appropriations.”
Sestak, who is opposing Specter in the upcoming Senate primary race, wasn’t at odds with him on this issue.
Sestak supports the proposed channel deepening “so that the channel can accommodate larger modern vessels, improving the competitiveness of the port and building and sustaining local jobs,” said his spokesman Jonathon Dworkin.
Sestak is also committed to working with the Army Corps “to find beneficial uses of the dredge material, such as material to fill abandoned Pennsylvania mines and for habitat restoration, so that further benefits can come from the project.”
Environmental groups, along with New Jersey and Delaware officials, dispute those projections. They say dredging would hurt fisheries, endanger an aquifer that supplies drinking water to southern New Jersey and create spoils that would have to be deposited somewhere.
“The government’s job is to make sure we balance these interests,” Christie said in a news conference on the bank of the river.
In Wilmington last week, a U.S. district judge ruled that the project could begin.
On Monday, the Norfolk Dredging Co. began work on a $11 million project to do routine maintenance dredging of a 13-mile portion of the river. The Corps added an option to pay the firm $24 million to deepen the channel.
For more than a decade, Congress has added and taken away funding for the project, which the Army Corps expects to take at least five years and cost more than $300 million. None is in the federal budget for fiscal 2011.
The Delaware Riverkeeper and the New Jersey Environmental Federation and the New Jersey Sierra Club have joined ranks with New Jersey officials in opposing the project.
Brady, whose district also includes Chester and other portions of Delaware County, on Tuesday afternoon had basically three words for supporting the deepening of the river channel: jobs, jobs, jobs.
“I’ve been supporting this project since 1998,” when he first took office in Congress, he said. “It makes us a competitive port. We’re not competitive now with North Jersey and Delaware.
“(Ships) sail right by us to New York,” Brady said. “They could have our people in Delaware County working on the waterfront.
“For years, I’ve been fighting with Rob Andrews and he keeps blaming state Sen. (Steve) Sweeney (D-Gloucester),” Brady said. “And when I talk to Sweeney, he blames Rob Andrews. So finally now that they had a press conference together we know they’re playing good guy, bad guy.
“There’s no environmental issue (regarding sludge disposal.) It’s clean and we’ve made arrangements to bring it someplace else if New Jersey doesn’t want it and they’re still against it.”
Rendell in the past has questioned why it’s all right for New Jersey officials to support the dredging of the Port of New York/New Jersey to 45 feet and 50 feet, but not the Port of Philadelphia.
Andrews said the correct clean-water and clean-air permits had been received by the Army Corps for the Port of New York/New Jersey, but not for the Port of Philadelphia.
“The best way to create more jobs in the Port of Philadelphia is to build more piers, roads and warehouses,” Andrews said. He said the port is close to landing a deal with Mitsubishi Motors for a major car import facility and they don’t need a 45-foot-deep channel.
He said the refineries along the channel haven’t committed to building 45-foot-deep berths for oil tankers with deeper drafts, the depth of water needed to float a ship.
The Delaware County Daily Times, 3/3/2010 |
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