Weekly News Summary For September 18-24, 2006:
Industrial Development Accelerating Along Tenn-Tom
“Why Iuka, Miss.?” asked the Canadian speaker, in a recent address to Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway interests about his company’s plans to establish a steel processing plant in the United States.
“We’d been to Buffalo; Gary, Ind.; St. Louis, Mo.; Louisville, Ky.; Birmingham; and many, many more places (during the site selection process),” he said, borrowing the phrase “I’ve been everywhere, man” from Johnny Cash.
The answer is because Iuka is on the Tenn-Tom Waterway and therefore allows the company access to the 12,000-mile inland waterway system and its low-cost barge transportation, he told conferees.
Gerald Valgora, the speaker and president of the Roll Form Division of Samuel Manu-Tech, a 150-year old steel distribution company based in Toronto, Ontario, was one of three executives of firms that are locating on the Tenn-Tom who spoke at the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway Development Opportunities Conference August 29–30 in Tunica, Miss.
He said that beside being on the waterway, the existence of a fully operational port—the Yellow Creek Port facility at Iuka, near the junction of the Tennessee River and the Tenn-Tom Waterway—was an important factor. And so was being near another metal processor, Ferrousouth Company, which processes steel coil into various products at the port. Thirdly, Valgora mentioned that Roll Form’s customer base is “drifting ever southward,” which was another consideration in his decision to locate at Iuka.
Roll Form is building a $22 million facility with 140,000 square feet of manufacturing space on 22 acres at Yellow Creek. The plant will create at least 40 jobs, only one of which will be filled by a Canadian. Production is slated to begin the second quarter of 2007.
The Roll Form Division makes building and heavy construction products, such as sheet piling, and custom-formed products mainly for the transportation industry, an example of which is a new lightweight, one-piece rail car.
Proximity to its customers was also one of the reasons another steel company, SeverCorr Inc., chose to locate an $880 million steel mill near Columbus, Miss. A Birmingham, Ala.-based company, SeverCorr will be milling steel for the automotive industry, which is no longer located solely in Detroit. Twenty-five percent of the autos today are assembled in the southern part of the U.S.: BMW in South Carolina, Nissan and Saturn in Tennessee, Hyundai, Honda and Mercedes in Alabama….
The Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MR-GO), an under-utilized shipping channel dug through the cypress marshes east of New Orleans in the late 1960s to provide a more direct deep draft access to the port, saw pressure for its closure ramped up several notches last week.
First, the St. Bernard Parish Council joined an already-filed lawsuit to close the canal, which has been dubbed a “hurricane highway.” Residents of St. Bernard blame the waterway for providing a direct route for storm surge waters that decimated most of the parish and surrounding areas in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last year.
Then, the New Orleans Times-Picayune carried a front page article in which Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) took the Corps of Engineers to task for “reading (Congress’) mandate (to study deauthorization of the channel) in an overly narrow way” and not addressing environmental problems “at the heart of the MR-GO closure discussion.”…
Transportation breakdowns in and around ports could force businesses to alter their production strategies or back away from assembling products in the United States because of unreliable supply chains, ultimately resulting in a loss of jobs, said Gerald L. Shaheen, chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Shaheen, president of Caterpillar Inc., in Peoria, Ill., discussed the state of the nation’s shipping safety and port infrastructure as the keynote speaker at the American Association of Port Authorities’ annual convention in New Orleans on September 12.
“Are we making the investments and implementing the policies necessary to keep pace with rising trade flows?” he asked rhetorically. “The answer is a resounding ‘no’ and, unfortunately, the consequences could be devastating.”
An independent study of the U.S. port system by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce “identified the challenges: insufficient funding, incoherent and burdensome regulatory procedures, an aversion to automation and information technology, and failure to move toward a truly integrated ‘intermodal system.’”…
The Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) appears to be lined up for consideration by a House/Senate Conference Committee later this month.
That’s good news for waterways supporters, who have waited for six years for new authorizing legislation since the last WRDA was signed into law.
But the good news is tempered by several provisions of the Senate version of the bill. The two most objected to by the waterways industry include an amendment by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) that would impose “independent peer review” on Corps projects, and a provision that would establish a Water Resources Coordinating Committee made up of Cabinet members. The committee would dictate planning for Corps of Engineers projects, replacing congressional oversight.
The provisions, said the Midwest Area River Coalition, would lead to “paralysis by analysis,” of the sort that stretched what was initially a six-year study of Upper Miss basin needs into a 13-year process….
United States Senate Majority Leader William H. Frist (R-Tenn.) will address waterway industry leaders at a seminar October 19 in Nashville, Tenn. The senator will speak at a luncheon of the Waterways Council Inc.’s 2006 symposium and annual meeting at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel.
A strong supporter of the waterways system, Sen. Frist has been instrumental in the movement of Senate Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) legislation, scheduling critical floor time for consideration of the bill and helping to move it toward passage. He is also seen as the Senate’s champion for the Chickamauga Lock project….
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