VPA seeks tenant for Portsmouth terminal
The Virginia Port Authority is soliciting offers to lease all or a portion of its Portsmouth Marine Terminal (PMT), according to advertisements placed in the October issue of American Shipper magazine and on the agency's Web site.
'We think that it's a facility that's well suited for breakbulk, bulk, project cargo or roll-on/roll-off,' spokesman Joe Harris said.
The announcement is a departure from the VPA's traditional business model of operating the port itself instead of acting as a landlord to private terminal operators, as do the majority of U.S. port authorities. It also runs counter to the VPA's strategy of controlling all the maritime and intermodal facilities within its jurisdiction.
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The request for interest in the Portsmouth terminal was precipitated by the VPA's agreement earlier this year to lease for 20 years the nearby APM Terminal, a high-tech modern container facility built three years ago. As part of that move, port officials shut down container operations at PMT and transferred vessel activity to the more efficient, semi-automated APM terminal. Among the stated goals of unifying all the terminals in the Hampton Roads area were more coordinated marketing and operations, in addition to extra capacity.
The VPA's philosophy for more than 30 years has been to control all the terminals in the area so it can rationalize ocean services and move ships to terminals that are best suited to quickly load and unload them, based on labor, space, equipment or other variables.
The VPA previously signaled that it had alternative plans for the Portsmouth facility, most recently in a press release last month declaring it no longer was considering three unsolicited bids to privatize the state-owned marine terminals.
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'Leasing APM Terminals will make the VPA overall operations more efficient, allow for the Portsmouth Marine Terminal to be put to other uses' and allow other infrastructure development to be postponed, Virginia Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton, said in the statement.
Harris said the VPA would not lease the Portsmouth terminal to a container handling company that will compete with its core business at the APM Terminal and Norfolk Marine Terminal on the other side of the Elizabeth River.
The VPA's 1 million-square-foot Newport News terminal handles and stores steel, automobiles and oversize cargo shipments. The agency envisions PMT processing wood chips or other commodities that aren't already transported through the port, Harris said.
'We leased APM, but we still have to pay the operating costs at PMT. By leasing it out we've shed those costs and the plan is to turn it into positive cash flow,' he explained, adding the VPA wants to wrap up its PMT operation by April 1.
The deadline for interested parties to submit a letter of interest regarding the Portsmouth facility is Oct. 28. ' Eric Kulisch
