Port of Green Bay: $88M for Local Economy
August 28, 07 by TheFleetIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Click to see picture of Tuesday 8/28/07’s visit by the Arthur M. Anderson
By Nathan Phelps | Source: Green Bay Press Gazette
A pair of workers standing near the end of the dock along the Fox River watched the Great Lakes freighter Arthur M. Anderson begin its journey out of the Port of Green Bay Tuesday afternoon.
The Anderson is one of more than 200 ships that come and go from the port on an annual basis, and since early spring port officials and terminal operators have been working to educate the public about just where — and what — the port is.
During a tall ship festival hosted in downtown Green Bay last summer, Port of Green Bay Director Dean Haen said they surveyed 2,000 people from the immediate area and the region.
“Nobody knew where the port of Green Bay was … and they think the port is a place you drive up to, that it’s a building,” he said. “But it’s these three miles of river made up of these 14 businesses doing commerce.”
The port runs from the mouth of the Fox River to the Georgia Pacific Broadway mill just south of the trestle bridge between Green Bay and Allouez.
Among the key goods moving through the port are coal, limestone, cement, salt and fuel oil.
“We want to start identifying where we are, who we are and what we do,” Haen said. “We have an international port here and have an advantage over almost all of the cities in Wisconsin — other than Milwaukee and Superior.”
Last year, 213 ships used the port, which handled 2.5 million metric tons of cargo, the third consecutive year of increases in that area. Looking back, the port handled about 3 million tons in 1970, 1.9 million tons in 1981 and 1.8 million tons in 1999, according to numbers from the port.
Haen said the port has an $88 million impact on the local economy and directly supports 726 jobs.
Late last spring, the port began the new initiative telling its story to the public though a new Web site and billboards that went up around the area and is scheduled to run for three years with the 14 port terminal operators covering costs.
One of those businesses using the port is Great Lakes Calcium, run by Wes Garner, a fifth-generation family member. The firm employs 25 people processing calcium carbonate primarily for bulk sales around the state and region.
“It costs us as much to bring it in 400 miles on a ship from the quarry to Green Bay as it would cost us to put in a truck and ship it from Green Bay to De Pere,” Garner said.
Calcium carbonate can be found in a number of agricultural uses, adhesives, coatings, glass, building supplies and environmental applications such as power plants, where it can be used to remove sulfur from the air stream, Garner said.
Great Lakes Calcium brings in about 15 shiploads — with a total of about 300,000 tons a year of calcium carbonate — from three quarries in Michigan and dry, crush, screen and sell the most of the product in bulk. About 5 percent of what they process is sold in retail locations for agricultural (under Hurlbut name) and other lawn and garden uses.
“We’re able to be strong in a number of different markets that are completely unrelated to one another,” Garner said. “You’re going to find that most products that come through the port are distributed within 150 miles of Green Bay,”
He estimates they do about $10 million of business a year.
Garner said he’s not sure people are fully aware of the port and the businesses tied to it.
“Every time I have somebody come out to visit, they say, ‘I never knew you were here,’” he said. “At the same time, anytime you watch a ship go down the channel, there are cars pulled over on the side of the road and they’re watching. So there is some visibility of the port, but I don’t think they realize what actually goes on.”
Garner said in recent years, they have faced increased security costs after 9/11 and are also faced with lower water levels and increased demand for vessels on the Great Lakes, which pushed up their shipping rates.
In terms of Great Lakes port, Haen said, Green Bay is a “middle-tier” port, with Duluth /Superior at the top of the food chain with about 42.9 million tons of goods passing through there last year.
Haen said they are continually working on deals to bring additional business to the port. One potential area for that growth may be in the wind turbine sector, which requires open areas to move blades and components off ships and the port’s location is idea for movement of parts to places in the Upper Midwest.
“We need to be out there actively selling Green Bay,” he said. “It could even be as far as rolling the steel here and making the towers… but those are big issues that take state support and city support.”
