The Savannah Harbor Expansion Project
- The total cost of the project is $706 million.
- Georgia has already raised $266 million. Washington is supposed to come up with the rest.
- About half of the $706 million is to be spent mitigating environmental harm.
- The project will deepen the river from 42 to 47 feet.
- The project stretches 41 miles, from the Garden City Terminal into the Atlantic Ocean.
- Dredging will take 62 months.
- The project will remove 24 million cubic yards of river mud, enough to fill seven Georgia Domes.
- Each dollar spent is projected to return $5.50 in benefits, or $174 million annually.
- 6,100 temporary jobs will be created.
Source: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Some facts about the Port of Savannah
- It's the fourth-busiest container port in the U.S. and the second-busiest on the East Coast, behind New York/New Jersey.
- Its impact on Georgia's economy has been estimated at $39 billion.
- About 100,000 jobs across metro Atlanta are port-related.
- It imported and exported a record 3.3 million containers last year.
Sources: Georgia Ports Authority, University of Georgia
As the Savannah Port deepening revs up, the Obama administration pledged $42 million over two years Monday to Georgia’s biggest economic development project.
It is a milestone moment for the deepening and a starting point for the $440 million the state expects as the federal government’s share of the $706 million project. Deepening the Savannah River from 42 feet to 47 feet will make way for larger container ships coming through a soon-to-be-expanded Panama Canal, stimulating the economy of the state and the region from what is already the fourth-busiest container port in the country.
“Yes, we are committed to seeing this project through,” Jo-Ellen Darcy, the assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, said at a news conference. “It’s a very important project for our future navigation.”
While the proposal does not put the federal government on pace to pay its share within the expected five-year span of construction, port-watchers cheered the step forward.
The Army Corps of Engineers made $21 million available immediately for this fiscal year, drawn from funds already appropriated by Congress. It requested another $21 million in the president’s fiscal 2016 budget, which still must be approved by Congress but serves as a critical marker — particularly because Congress can no longer direct spending via earmarks.
“There’ll never be enough money until the final dollar is funded,” said Curtis Foltz, the executive director of the Georgia Ports Authority.
“But this keeps the project moving forward as quickly as it can and shows that the (Georgia congressional) delegation is working diligently with the Army Corps and the administration to move the football down the field. We are very pleased right now.”
The port’s impact on Georgia’s economy has been measured at $39 billion, a strong factor behind why Georgia’s congressional delegation has united across party lines to push the project since Congress first authorized it in 1999.
“The expansion and deepening of the Port of Savannah has been a top priority of mine since coming to the Senate in 2005, and I am so pleased to see this critical project get underway,” Georgia Republican U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson said.
Said U.S. Rep. David Scott, an Atlanta Democrat: “The budget funding is a start, but we need a bigger commitment.”
In Atlanta, Gov. Nathan Deal and the Legislature have put aside $266 million in state funds to kick-start the project. It officially began last week as salvage crews worked to raise a Confederate warship from the bottom of the river.
Deal called the initial funding “an important building block” that “will allow the port deepening to move along as scheduled for now.”
U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, a Pooler Republican, just arrived in Washington after spending a decade in the Legislature. He pointed out that state lawmakers continued to put aside money for the deepening during the recession.
“It’s good to finally see that the president has acknowledged that it’s a project that’s got to be done,” Carter said.
A year ago, Georgia’s political and business leaders were stunned and steamed when President Barack Obama’s budget put up a roadblock by not designating Savannah as an ongoing construction project — despite a congressional directive to do so. The administration maintained that Congress still had to reauthorize the deepening in a water resources bill before it could give the final go-ahead.
Obama signed the water bill in June. In October, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Georgia Ports Authority signed a long-awaited project partnership agreement to start the dredging.
Monday’s announcement is a critical moment, former Army Corps economist Don Sweeney said, because it gives the project a yearly foothold in the construction budget and means it will most likely be fully funded. It just might not happen within the five years planned for construction.
“If you look at corps projects historically in years where budget funds are scarce and money is tight at the federal level, then those funds that are available get spread over many different projects, thereby expanding the construction timeline,” said Sweeney, now associate director for the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
And a lot still depends on a Congress that has struggled with spending bills.
“It’s likely Congress will continue to fund this project,” Sweeney said, “but given the way Congress has been so dysfunctional, it could end up with no appropriations bill, which means anything could happen.”
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