Paducah’s Riverport West Project Advances
A proposed new riverport in Paducah, Ky., is “shovel ready” if grants are received to cover the construction cost.
Jimmie Garrett, executive director of the Paducah-McCracken County Riverport Authority, said the new port, to be named Paducah-McCracken County Riverport West, is designed to the 90 percent level and has all environmental studies complete. He spoke about the project and the work at the existing riverport, now known as Riverport East, at the Paducah Propeller Club’s February 11 meeting.
The riverport, in collaboration with local engineering firm Bacon Farmer Workman, intends to apply for three federal grant programs administered by the U.S. Department of Transportation for portions of the project, Garrett said. He is hopeful to know the application results by the third quarter of this year, which would allow construction to begin in the first quarter of 2027.
The port is expected to cost more than $70 million to build, Garrett said. Once funding is in place, it is expected to take 18 to 24 months for construction.
The port is located immediately adjacent to property that Greater Paducah Economic Development is marketing as the “triple rail” site, as it has access to major railroads in all directions. It is also within five miles of Interstate 24 and Paducah’s airport.
The grant application and construction timelines are designed to coincide with the planned construction of a $1.5 billion commercial uranium enrichment facility that will be built 2 miles from the new port at an existing site owned by the U.S. Department of Energy. That project was announced in August. Garrett said it would make sense to bring in heavy equipment and construction materials through the port, by either river or rail, for both development of the triple rail site and the DOE site. Those future facilities would also be well positioned as port customers, he said.
Garrett said the port site, at Ohio River Mile 944 on the left descending bank will complement that site, with railroad tracks going onto the 600-foot-wide dock and a heavy haul road providing multimodal access to multiple barge berths.
“One of the things we have been diligent about is making sure the design of this new facility is versatile,” Garrett said.
The riverport’s current design would use a tower crane, with the possibility of relocating tower crane from Riverport East. That crane is already North America’s largest crane of its type, with a 105,000-pound lifting capacity and a 200-foot boom, he said. He also anticipates a material handler to be purchased for the 38-acre site and located just upstream so that the port can provide off-loading and on-loading of raw products at the same time as crane operations.
“What you’re looking for is a customer who wants access to rail, river and road,” he said, adding that the site could accommodate multiple customers with those needs.
A $3.5 million state grant allowed the engineering and environmental work on the site, which has been designed to be elevated above the 500-year floodplain.
One reason the Riverport West site is so important is because the existing Riverport East is nearly at capacity. The riverport has leased out all but 2 developable acres of that property, located 8 miles away between Miles 1.3 and 2.0 of the Tennessee River, near its confluence with the Ohio.
Riverport East is the second largest by volume moved of Kentucky’s seven active public riverports, behind only the Owensboro, Ky., riverport. Established in 1968, major products handled include sand and limestone aggregate for construction, supersacks of raw materials for local manufacturing, fertilizer for agricultural use and radioactive products from existing regional facilities. The port moves about 500,000 tons of material annually, including a majority of the construction aggregates used in McCracken County and its surrounding counties, Garrett said.
The riverport is also home to a federal Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ), which allows companies importing goods to defer the duties or tariffs on them until removing them from a secured warehouse facility at the port to enter the domestic supply chain. The FTZ, which the port secured in 2016, received its first customer last year following new American tariffs on imported goods last April.
“My phone started ringing off the hook,” Garrett said. Since then, he said, companies in both McCracken County and adjacent Graves County are making use of the FTZ warehousing space.
