Eighteen years after its opening was hailed as the beginning of a renaissance for the port of Baltimore, the Seagirt Marine Terminal is operating at less than half capacity, despite longtime state efforts to bolster traffic at the only port terminal that exclusively handles lucrative container cargo.
Containerized cargo remains the port's bread and butter, accounting for 65 percent of the business at Maryland's public terminals. But Seagirt continues to lose ground to its East Coast competitors, as container volume growth in Norfolk, New York and Savannah has far outpaced Baltimore.
A perennial obstacle to the Maryland Port Administration's quest to boost business there is one it can't change: Baltimore's inland location. Calling on Baltimore requires a day's sail up the Chesapeake Bay, costing time, pilot fees and increasingly expensive fuel.
But Seagirt is also beset by structural problems that port officials are seeking to resolve:
*While double-stacking containers on trains has become the industry standard for efficiency reasons, only single-stacked cars can move out of Seagirt.
*Seagirt lacks a 50-foot-deep berth and the cranes to accommodate the larger vessels coming from Asia, an asset its chief competitors in Norfolk and New York already have.
*Some 66 precious waterfront acres at Seagirt are occupied by CSX Corp.'s intermodal station, where it mostly transfers trucked-in domestic containers. Only 10 percent of containers handled there come in by ship, though the facility was built to support international trade.
Hiring a private contractor to run Seagirt under a long-term lease is one possible avenue the state could pursue by mid-2009. The operator would assume complete control of Seagirt - the berths, cranes, containers, asphalt, everything but the land itself - and cough up millions for projects that the state feels it can't afford.
"We'd say, 'Here's the keys: you operate it for 30 years and continue to improve the facility so you can continue to handle the ships that operate there,' " said James J. White, the port administration's executive director. "We have to create an environment that's better than other ports so the ship owners want to come here."
