NEW YORK: New York officials are seeking a tenant to reactivate the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, which recently was designated as part of the U.S. Maritime Administration’s Marine Highways initiative.
The city’s Economic Development Corp. recently leased the 88-acre terminal, a former automobile import facility, and plans to sublease 72 acres to a shipping tenant. Five percent of the revenue would be distributed to neighborhood organizations.
Initially, the terminal is being pitched to shippers of breakbulk and project cargoes, but local officials hope to develop it into a container terminal.
During the last 40 years, most of the bi-state port’s container traffic has gravitated to New Jersey, which has better rail and highway links with inland markets and more land for cargo handling. About 85 percent of the port’s container volume moves through New Jersey terminals.
Reviving cargo handling on the Brooklyn side of New York Harbor has been a longtime goal of Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who said he was “thrilled” by Marad’s inclusion of the South Brooklyn terminal in the federal Marine Highways program.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said reopening the terminal would be “a big step toward putting our waterfront back to work. Soon, cargo ships that would have docked in New Jersey will be docking here in Brooklyn, bringing good jobs, taking trucks off our streets and helping spur this growing industrial hub.”
The recent inclusion of the South Brooklyn terminal and the nearby Red Hook Container Terminal in the Marine Highways initiative clears the way for federal subsidies of container-on-barge operations.
A cross-harbor barge service between Red Hook and Port Newark Container Terminal is targeted for launch in late summer or early fall, said Michael Stamatis, CEO of Red Hook Container Terminal. He said final details are being worked out with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the service’s first carrier customer, Mediterranean Shipping Co.
The new service would be in addition to an existing two-barge service linking Red Hook with its sister Newark terminal, Stamatis told JOC.com. He said the service handles about 40,000 containers on its barges, each of which has capacity of more than 400 twenty-foot-equivalent units.
Although Brooklyn lacks the inland rail connections of the larger New Jersey terminals, Stamatis said it is well-situated to serve New York City, Long Island and other locations east of the Hudson River. “The advantage is proximity to one of the largest markets in the United States,” he said.
Red Hook has handled 49,337 TEUs year-to-date, a 41 percent increase from a year ago, Stamatis said. The terminal’s main customers are Seaboard Marine, which has weekly service to and from the Caribbean, Central America and the West Coast of South America, and CMA CGM, which calls bi-weekly on a round-the-world service.
The terminal has 42 feet of water at dockside and about 80 acres of usable space. The largest ships at Red Hook have a capacity of about 4,000 TEUs but primarily serves smaller vessels that generate only a few hundred lifts. Stamatis said the terminal consistently handles more than 30 hourly lifts per crane.
Stamatis said the reopened South Brooklyn terminal would complement Red Hook and provide the port with capacity needed to handle rising volume. “SBMT is the only place left in New York City that’s suitable for development as a large container terminal,” he said.
