Seagirt

Italian Line, which pulled out of the port of Baltimore a decade ago, will return next month as part of a joint service with the French-based CMA-CGM Group, port and company officials confirmed yesterday.CMA-CGM, which calls at Seagirt Marine Terminal with service from the Mediterranean every other week, will replace that with the joint service, arriving every nine days. By August or September, it plans to make the service weekly, said Louis Le Gendre, president of CMA-CGM America Inc., based in Secaucus, N.J.The Maryland Port Administration said the service was expected to add about 10,000 containers a year at Seagirt.

The state Board of Public Works yesterday approved a three-year, $35.4 million contract for ITO Corp. of Baltimore to continue operating the Seagirt Marine Terminal.Also, Tay Yoshitani, executive director of the Maryland Port Administration, said Italia Line would be returning to the port next month after an absence of more than a decade. Details of the line's plans were not immediately available.ITO has operated Seagirt since it opened in 1990, said Linda Jordan, manager of communications for the MPA, which owns the state's five marine terminals.

The Blizzard of 1996 shut down three of the state's five public marine terminals and severely limited operations at the other two, Seagirt and Dundalk, until yesterday afternoon.Longshoremen lost wages. Steamship lines lost time. Customers around the East Coast were forced to wait longer for merchandise with trucks stranded everywhere.With highways shut down or blocked in the snow-bound Mid-West and East, only 15 trucks had arrived at Seagirt and Dundalk by midday yesterday to drop off or pick up containers or other cargo.

The port of Baltimore is extending hours of gate operation for truckers at Seagirt Marine Terminal, making it the only terminal on the East Coast to keep its gates open to midnight, according to port officials.Under an agreement reached with the International Longshoremen's Association, the operating hours at the state's ultra-modern terminal will be extended by six hours, from 7 a.m. to midnight, rather than closing at 6 p.m.Gov. William Donald Schaefer noted in a statement Thursday that the extra hours mean that truckers using Seagirt will have time to deliver or pick up their containers at the end of the workday.

At a lavish opening ceremony in 1990, Seagirt Marine Terminal was modestly hailed as the "the greatest facility in the world," a state-of-the-art container terminal that would restore the port of Baltimore to its former glory as the gateway to the Midwest.One of the most technologically advanced terminals anywhere, Seagirt has been pivotal to the resurgence of the once beleaguered port. In an era when ports are competing furiously for fewer and fewer ships, it is the state's Camden Yards on the Patapsco, an impressive signal to the world's shippers that Maryland wants their business.

ANNAPOLIS -- Adrian Teel, the executive director of the Maryland Port Administration, told a legislative panel yesterday that the port agency would like to buy the Seagirt Marine Terminal from the Maryland Transportation Authority, which provided more than $200 million to build it.That suggestion had members of a Senate Budget and Taxation subcommittee bristling at the thought, however, that motorists might end up paying for the purchase through an increase...

The Feb. 13 disappearance of Gerard Anthony Mack, an employee of the Maryland Port Authority in Dundalk, continues to baffle authorities."He was the kind of person who rarely missed work," said Ray C. Feldmann, a port authority spokesman. "This is very unusual behavior. He has been a good employee for 19 years. It is so out of character for us or his family not to hear from him."Mr. Mack, who is employed as an engineering surveyor, has not been seen since about 8 p.m. Feb. 13. A truck belonging to him was found on a parking lot at Seagirt Marine Terminal with the keys in the ignition, officials said.

The Mediterranean Shipping Co. will increase by several thousand containers the cargo it moves through the port of Baltimore under an agreement announced yesterday with the Maryland Port Administration.The agreement gives the company special rates for cargo moved through the Seagirt Marine Terminal to and from southern and western destinations. The increased business in the port stems largely from improved rail service at the 2-year-old Seagirt terminal.Last year, the CSX Corp., one of two major railroads serving Baltimore, opened a rail yard at Seagirt as it closed its Potomac Yards facilities in Alexandria, Va. That will enable companies like Mediterranean to ship more cheaply by rail directly from the port, rather than trucking cargo first to Alexandria.

ANNAPOLIS -- Adrian Teel, the executive director of the Maryland Port Administration, told a legislative panel yesterday that the port agency would like to buy the Seagirt Marine Terminal from the Maryland Transportation Authority, which provided more than $200 million to build it.That suggestion had members of a Senate Budget and Taxation subcommittee bristling at the thought, however, that motorists might end up paying for the purchase through an increase...

Hapag-Lloyd, one of the top five steamship lines in the port, may stop sending its ships to Baltimore, Timothy P. Collins, the line's vice president of operations, said yesterday."

The Maryland Port Administration is inviting private companies interested in leasing and running the Seagirt Marine Terminal to submit their qualifications to become a partner in the venture, officials said Wednesday. The move is another step toward finding a private partner to invest more than $100 million in capital improvements at the Southeast Baltimore terminal. Last fall, the MPA hired a consulting firm to help it draw up plans for the venture. The state is calculating that it will need an influx of private money to pay for construction of a 50-foot berth at Seagirt in time for the 2014 completion of a wider, deeper Panama Canal.

The Maryland Port Administration has taken the first step toward leasing the Seagirt Marine Terminal to a private company that would spend more than $100 million to expand the terminal and then run it. The agency has agreed to hire a Florida-based consulting firm to identify possible bidders willing to spend $100 million to $120 million to expand Seagirt's capacity and then manage the terminal under a long-term lease with the state. The money is needed to build berths with a depth of 50 feet to accommodate the larger container ships that are expected to dominate world commerce after the widening and deepening of the Panama Canal is completed in 2014.

Baltimore, founded as an inland deep-water port, now finds itself losing a competitive struggle for the container traffic that carries much of the world's commerce. The Seagirt Marine Terminal, opened 18 years ago to help the port of Baltimore compete for this lucrative business, is struggling to cope with an array of operating disadvantages that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars to remedy with no assurance of future success. A possible answer, port officials believe, is to lease the entire Seagirt facility for 30 to 40 years to a private operator willing to invest in making the facility a success.

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.

Taiwan-based Evergreen Marine Corp. will sign today an agreement to continue service to Baltimore for 10 years as it eyes an increase in traffic between the East Coast and Asia. The new longer-term contract keeps Evergreen's guarantee to move at least 40,000 loaded containers through Seagirt Marine Terminal annually. Evergreen is the second largest container line operating in the port and the only one to provide direct service to Asia, a market port officials have tried to expand in recent years.

Port officials are sounding out potential investors to help fund a $120 million project to deepen a berth at the Seagirt Marine Terminal - a project they say is needed to accommodate bigger ships passing through a to-be-widened Panama Canal. If the initiative moves forward, it would be the first time the state has turned to private investors to finance improvements at the public terminals of the Helen Delich Bentley Port of Baltimore. The Maryland Port Administration said it needs to add a 50-foot-deep berth at Seagirt to stay competitive as the shipping industry moves to larger vessels.

A computer glitch at a port of Baltimore terminal kept dozens of trucks from entering the port yesterday and forced them to line up for more than three hours on nearby streets, snarling traffic and taxing police officers. "There was a whole slew of trucks," said Sgt. Robert Ways of the Maryland Transportation Authority Police. "I've never seen so many trucks. But the drivers cooperated pretty good." The problem was traced to a computer system that records the identity and contents of trucks entering and leaving Seagirt Marine Terminal.

When it comes to Dubai Port World's possible takeover of a company with significant operations at six U.S. ports, including Baltimore's, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. "has concerns," but he's also "hopeful." One day he's looking into canceling the firm's Maryland contract, but he later says the matter is on the "right path." Such floundering must be contagious. During a hearing Friday in Annapolis, Mr. Ehrlich's transportation secretary told state legislators he agreed with the reservations expressed by Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, who said she has "no confidence" in the Bush administration - but he also said he expected the matter to work out in the end. If the sale of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. has been a nightmare for the Bush administration, it's been no picnic for the Ehrlich administration either.

The British parent company of P&O Ports, the terminal operator and stevedoring firm that handles much of the cargo at the port of Baltimore, agreed yesterday to be sold to the government-owned Dubai Ports World. No job cuts or other major changes are expected at the company, which operates at about 100 ports in 18 countries, after the sale of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. The sale price is 3.3 billion pounds, or $5.7 billion, in cash. Per share, that's 443 pence, or $7.60.

A little-known ocean carrier cobbled together with secondhand ships, the Mediterranean Shipping Co. was passed over when Baltimore's Seagirt Marine Terminal was shopping for its first tenants in 1988. Maryland transportation officials were reserving the $250 million, state-of-the-art terminal for the world's top cargo carriers in hopes of scoring a blockbuster deal that would reverse the steady loss of longshoremen jobs to Hampton Roads, Va. It wasn't until Gov. William Donald Schaefer intervened that Geneva-based Mediterranean Shipping was invited to become the terminal's first tenant in September 1990.