Posted on February 15, 2018
President Donald Trump did not include any money for the Charleston Harbor deepening in his proposed budget for the coming federal fiscal year, but the lack of funding won’t keep dredges from starting to dig the waterway later this month.
The U.S. government allocated $17 million in a previous budget to begin the dredging and another $300 million already set aside by South Carolina officials will keep the project going while federal dollars trickle in over the coming years.
“This project is not alone, as there are many very important and worthy civil works projects around the nation that are justified for construction that are not funded” in next year’s budget, Glenn Jeffries, spokeswoman for the Army Corps of Engineers in Charleston, said of harbor deepening. “In an era of constrained resources, hard decisions have to be made with available resources.”
Jim Newsome, president and CEO of the State Ports Authority, said the deepening project will start on time this month “thanks to the work of our (state) legislature in proactively setting aside $300 million in 2012.”
Newsome said South Carolina politicians as well as the SPA’s board and management continue to push for federal funding.
“Clearly, top 10 U.S. container ports achieving harbor depths of 50 feet or more are deserving of such funding in the big container ship era,” Newsome said. He added an infrastructure plan Trump announced Monday, which leverages federal dollars with local contributions, “will give further impetus to funding essential container port infrastructure in the U.S.”
The Army Corps last fall awarded two contracts to Great Lakes Dredge & Dock to start digging Charleston Harbor to a 52-foot depth, giving the Port of Charleston the deepest waterway on the East Coast.
The first contract, for $47 million, is to remove 6 million cubic yards of material from the harbor’s entrance channel. The second contract — at $213 million the largest awarded by the local Army Corps office — is to remove nearly 8 million cubic yards of material from the entrance channel. Work under those contracts is expected to take between 40 and 76 months. Additional dredging of the upper and lower harbors has not been finalized.
The harbor deepening is part of roughly $2 billion the authority will spend over the next few years to accommodate large container ships traveling to the East Coast through the expanded Panama Canal. Other projects include a new container terminal, strengthening the wharf at the port’s Wando Welch Terminal and purchasing new cranes and other equipment.
While no money was set aside in Trump’s budget for Charleston, the president did allocate $49 million toward dredging the Port of Savannah’s shipping channel. That $973 million project needs roughly $100 million a year to avoid construction delays.
The president’s budget for fiscal 2019 also included about $29 million for Army Corps projects in South Carolina, with $20.6 million of that going toward Charleston Harbor maintenance dredging. The federal allocation also provides money for routine operation and maintenance of the Cooper River Rediversion Project, the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway and various environmental surveys and inspections.
Trump’s $4.4 trillion budget also includes money to hire 2,000 federal agents to help arrest undocumented immigrants and $1.6 billion to build a portion of his promised wall along the Mexican border while making deep cuts to health care, education grants, environmental programs and community development. The budget now moves to Congress, which is likely to rewrite much of the spending plan.
Source: HELLENIC SHIPPING NEWS
