Weekly News Summary For September 7-13, 2009:
The economic impact of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway just over the last 13 years has dwarfed the cost of construction of the waterway, said Mike Tagert, administrator of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway Development Authority.
Speaking at the authority’s annual Development Opportunities Conference at Point Clear, Miss., August 26, Tagert said the waterway has directly created nearly 30,000 jobs in the Tenn-Tom corridor.
The original cost of construction of the waterway was about $2 billion.
“If you took the initial investment, and you adjusted it to 2008 dollars, which we felt was necessary to get a conservative estimate, it would cost approximately $6 billion to build the waterway in 2008 dollars,” Tagert said. “But just in labor income alone, we’ve generated $7 billion.”
But that only tells a small part of the economic story. According to a new brochure made available by the authority, those 30,000 direct jobs created by the waterway led to the creation of 29,000 indirect jobs based on industry-to-industry transactions, and nearly 80,000 “induced” jobs that were created based on employee spending in the local economy….
The energy bill working its way through Congress would be a bad idea for the Southeast, said speakers at the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway Development Opportunities Conference.
“We’ve somehow been convinced that we have an energy crisis in this country when it comes to electricity generation,” said Lance Brown, executive director of the Partnership for Affordable Clean Energy (PACE), which was organized earlier this year to oppose the bill.
“We don’t have an energy crisis whatsoever. What we have is a political crisis. It’s a crisis that’s going to pit several parts of the country against the Southeast. It’s one that could end up fundamentally changing the way we produce electricity. It’s one that could cause rates for residential customers and for businesses to go up by as much as 60 percent in the next 20 years. That’s not the kind of future we need, And it’s one that, frankly, is artificial, that’s been created by Washington politicians.”
Simply put, Brown said, the No. 1 goal of the bill—which is known as the Waxman-Markey bill after its congressional sponsors, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.)—is “to tax and otherwise eliminate coal from the national energy mix. That’s the goal of Waxman-Markey over the next 40 years.”
“I don’t have to tell you guys what that means to the Tenn-Tom waterway system,” Brown said. “When about a quarter of all traffic is coal, that means a lot to the people who make their living on the river system.”…
After months of criticism of the Corps of Engineers from Louisiana state officials, including Sen. Mary Landrieu, President Barak Obama is creating an interagency task force to oversee restoration of the Louisiana and Mississippi coastlines that removes the Corps from its lead role in that effort to date.
The interagency effort will be led by two White House offices, the Council on Environmental Quality and the White House Office of Management and Budget, according to Nancy Sutley, head of the CEQ, in an August 26 interview with Bloomberg News. The Corps will continue to be a member of the group.
The initiative is partly a response to a letter Sen. Landrieu sent to the president on July 31 in which she asked for “reform” of the Corps, and urged the president to form a “high-level working group” to coordinate Gulf coastal restoration and flood protection.
Louisiana state officials first heard of the administration’s initiative from an August 22 interview that Obama granted in the Oval Office to two reporters from the New Orleans Times-Picayune….
Since its official opening in 2006, the Port Arthur, Texas, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS), one of the newest systems in the country, is already showing a dramatic reduction in marine incidents—especially those involving deep draft vessels.
In 2006, VTS recorded an incident involving a ship in one of every 295 transits. The number of transits per incident increased to 402 in 2007, and by 2008 there were 601 transits per incident.
For towboats and tows, the number of transits per incident increased from 2006 to 2007 but the number dropped from 1,629 transits per incident in 2007 to 1,339 transits per incident in 2008, said Mike Measells, VTS Director and Waterways Manager.
He attributed construction work at a critical bridge on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW) with the slight increase in 2008 incidents, emphasizing that most of the reported incidents there were minor allisions with construction equipment that narrowed the channel considerably.
The Port Arthur VTS covers the largest constantly monitored area of responsibility of any VTS on the Gulf Coast, Measells said. Using VHF Channel 1A in the lower section and VHF Channel 65A in the upper section, the area covered includes the Sabine River from the sea buoy through Port Arthur and up to Orange, Texas, near the Louisiana border….
The Arkansas River Historical Society honored four individuals on August 28 who have contributed “outstanding service to the development of the Arkansas River, its basin, and the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River navigation system.”
The four honorees—Joseph Adams, Paul Revis, Jon Stuart and Wilbur West—were inducted into the Arkansas River Hall of Fame at a ceremony at the annual U. S. Army Corps of Engineers Arkansas River Navigation Conference at the River Center at Three Forks Landing, Muskogee, Okla.
The awards were presented by Randy Tardy, a former business and transportation writer for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, Ark., who is president of the Arkansas River Historical Society.
Joseph Q. Adams, a long-serving city attorney and municipal judge in Catoosa, Okla., served for 26 years on the board of directors of the Tulsa-Rogers County Port Authority. He was recognized in 1985 as Catoosa Citizen of the Year.
Paul N. Revis retired from the Little Rock Engineer District in 1993, after a 30-year career with the Corps of Engineers, to become executive director of the Arkansas Waterways Commission. He was involved in numerous waterways associations, serving as president of the Arkansas Oklahoma Port Operators Association and president of the Arkansas River Basin Development association. Revis was a member of the University of Arkansas’ Professional Advisory Board for their Mack-Blackwell Transportation Center….
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