Port Of Charleston’s Competitive Position Slips Further

ANOTHER YEAR, ANOTHER DROPOFF

FITSNews – January 30, 2008 – Since we were kicking around former S.C. Ports Authority board member Tumpy Campbell a good bit yesterday, we figured we ought to give you a reason why. And here it is – according to this morning’s edition of the Charleston Post and Courier, the once-proud Port of Charleston is slipping even further behind its competitors … again. From the P&C story:

The Port of Charleston reported a double-digit drop in container volume in 2007, but it will likely hang on to its position as the fourth-busiest East Coast port.

The port handled the equivalent of 1.75 million 20-foot-long containers in the last calendar year, down 11 percent from 2006, according to the State Ports Authority.

Four years ago the Port of Charleston was the fourth-largest in the nation, not the East Coast, but South Carolina’s insistence on maintaining a communist “total state control” model for port expansion and its failure to aggressively pursue public-private partnerships (like our competitors in Virginia, Florida, Alabama and several other states) has caused our state to squander its most valuable competitive asset.

Ports Authority board members Campbell, Bill Stern and Harry Butler bear the lion’s share of the blame for this disaster (they cast the deciding votes back in 2005 against free market expansion), but Gov. Mark Sanford deserves his fair share of criticism as well for failing to get rid of these three nimrods years ago.

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