Funding slowing terminal

CHARLESTON -- Thanks to a funding glitch, a joint South Carolina-Georgia port terminal planned for Jasper County continues to fall behind schedule in one of the most elementary ways: getting an easement lifted from the tract where it will be built.

The Joint Project Office overseeing the development paid for an analysis of where to move the dredge disposal operation currently taking place on the site. But the project office never had the money in hand to give to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to review that analysis.

And so, from April until now, that most basic aspect of the project remained stalled.

Project office chairman Bill Bethea updated the group at a meeting held Monday at the S.C. State Ports Authority that officials had pared down the $300,000 price tag for the review and that, by funneling that money through the Georgia Ports Authority, the project office should have the review of the analysis complete in January.

"With what's happened in the last year and a half, the urgency is not there," Bethea said after the meeting, alluding to the international shipping decline.

Despite that delay, other elements of the 1,500-acre project will move forward as planned. Longtime maritime rivals South Carolina and Georgia together acquired the site near Ridgeland in July 2008 at a $7.6 million price tag. The state-of-the-art terminal, capable of handling the equivalent of 7 million 20-foot-long containers a year, would open no earlier than 2020.

Representatives with engineering firm Moffatt & Nichol said at the meeting that the economic analysis is almost entirely finished and that preliminary terminal planning is about 90 percent complete.

Officials continue to study on-dock rail access to the terminal. Although CSX Corp. easily could serve the facility, competing rail line Norfolk Southern would have to cross the river to reach the terminal. Project office vice chairman Jim Balloun said CSX, in recent talks, seemed open to discussions of allowing Norfolk Southern to use its tracks to ensure that both rail lines can serve the terminal.

The project office elected Balloun, a business leader and board president of the Georgia Commerce Club, as chairman for the new year. The group elected outgoing S.C. State Ports Authority chairman David Posek as vice chairman.

Reach Allyson Bird at 937-5594 or abird@postandcourier.com.