Growing and attracting business in the Port of Green Bay is an ongoing process requiring time and patience.
Port officials say they continue to work on expanding opportunities in the facility and an updated survey is designed to help with that process.
“Business development is constant effort. You have to keep working in the hopes something happens,” said Dean Haen, director of Brown County’s Port & Resource Recovery department. “Port development efforts take lots of time, they don’t come around all the time, but you need to stay working on them in the hopes one of them comes to fruition.”
Matters facing the port, and the waterborne shipping industry, were discussed at the port’s recent annual symposium that brings together port businesses, government officials and shipping industry leaders.
More than a dozen businesses operate in the port transporting petroleum products, coal, limestone and other products.
The symposium included a presentation about identifying and cataloging properties in the port that can be presented to new, or existing, port businesses for potential development .
“We’ve know those lands are there, but it gives us another tool in the toolbox,” Haen said.
“It updates costs of improvements, so if we have someone who wants to come to the Port of Green Bay and they need so much dock wall, but the property is limited in rail access, we can quantify that and say ‘This property is X million dollars to get it into use, and this one is Y millions of dollars to get it into use.’”
On average, Haen said the port has seen a new business about every five years.
Among near-term work at the port is an upgrade to Noble Petro Inc.’s facilities in Green Bay. A grant awarded from the state last year provided funding to buy equipment that will allow the company to transfer gasoline to and from barges.
The 2014 shipping season is off to a slow start due to heavy ice on the Great Lakes this winter and spring. That comes on top of a loss of two weeks of shipping at the end of 2013, also due to ice.
“As we get into the 2014 season we’ve lost three weeks ... so how the shipping season plays out is to be determined, but those three weeks we lost cannot be recaptured,” Haen said. “If the economy stays strong, at the end of the year we won’t even notice we’ve lost these two to three weeks.
“If the economy weakens, we will wish we had these two to three weeks,” he said
Industry safety was among the items covered at the symposium. Between 2002 and 2011, five employee fatalities occurred on ships — three on U.S.-flagged ships and two on on Canadian ships, according a report analyzing U.S. and Canadian government statistics.
The report indicates 99.997 percent of trips were injury free due to shipping accidents.
“We inherently believed the system was safe,” said Stephen Brooks of the Ottawa-based Chamber of Marine Commerce who presented the report at the symposium. “But it’s one thing to go into a government leader’s office and say ‘We’re safe,’ but until you have the empirical data ... you don’t bring that gravitas to your argument.”
The report contends workers on the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway system have lower fatality rates than other modes of transportation.
“Employee fatality rates were about 50 percent higher for rail transportation and 5.5 times higher of long-distance trucking compared to Great Lakes-Seaway mariners,” the report says.