By KEVIN CHIRI
Slidell news bureau
SLIDELL – The first phase of the largest job creation project in the history of Louisiana could be completed in 12 months—with a potential of over 34,000 jobs created in five years–and it is a St. Tammany Parish senator who is earning the accolades for leading the massive undertaking that he has worked on for seven years.
The Louisiana International Gulf Transfer Terminal (LIGTT) is an idea that was kicked around by Louisiana governors and legislators as far back as the mid-90s, but the plan never got off the ground for a variety of reasons.
The idea was to build the biggest port ever for Louisiana to accept larger container ships, a port that needed to be built at the mouth of the Mississippi River at the southernmost point of the state at Southwest Pass.
The project was constantly hitting roadblocks because it would still require an annual contribution of $100 million from the Corps of Engineers to keep the river dredged deep enough to receive the increasingly larger container ships.
Crowe revived the idea in 2008 when he began his term as senator from District 1, but found the key to unlocking the success when he reviewed several studies and went forward with the idea of building the port approximately two-and-a-half miles off the eastern side of Southwest Pass, in the deeper waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
LIGTT was born and will now provide Louisiana with one of only three ports in the United States capable of handling the giant container ships that are becoming the norm for transporting more-and-more containers around the world.
Container ships in years past would carry up to 2,500 containers with products from all around the world. But Crowe said he learned years ago that the industry was beginning to build bigger ships, so big that they would be capable of moving as many as 22,500 containers in the future.
“That meant the ships holding that many containers needed much deeper waters to get the ships to port,” he said. “Even though the Port of New Orleans has been one of the busiest in the country, we faced a situation of not being able to accept those container ships anymore if we didn’t find a way to get the larger containers to our port.”
The solution, said Crowe, was to build LIGTT off the coast of the Southwest Pass. It will be a huge facility that will be built 30 to 40 feet above sea level and constructed in an area covering 2,300 acres. The giant container ships will dock at LIGTT in the Gulf of Mexico and unload products to smaller container ships, capable of moving up the Mississippi River at current water depths.
Initially planned to simply deal with containers, LIGTT will now be built five times bigger than initially planned so it can also handle petroleum products, grains and more.
The result for Louisiana is that up to 34,000 jobs should be created in the next five years.
“This will change the employment picture in Louisiana,” Crowe said. “There is nothing that has ever been close to this in terms of creating jobs for our state and I’m just happy to see we have been able to get this done.”
After numerous public hearings, Midstream Holdings, a private company, obtained approval for the lease, development agreement and public-private partnership. St. Tammany Parish attorney Tom Thornhill and co-manager Jim Woodworth are working with Wall Street financial advisers for the capital to fund the multi-billion dollar construction, expected to be nearly $10 billion when the entire facility is finished.
Private operators in shipping and oil and gas will operate the businesses at an annual lease cost of $2 million, which at the end of the 50-year lease, will be turned over to the state.
“Many people said this couldn’t be done,” Thornhill said. “It was tried before and didn’t work, but Crowe’s visionary approach to this project accomplishes what others were unable to accomplish for years utilizing traditional public financing.”
LIGTT will not only affect Louisiana in a positive way, but will increase port activity all the way up the Mississippi River, “affecting 32 other states,” Crowe said.
Had Louisiana not created a project such as this to accommodate the larger container ships that will soon be coming, the Port of New Orleans would have seen a drastic decline in port activity in the future. The business that comes into the port filters down to a multitude of other jobs and businesses which are affected by products moving throughout the country, with a state in New Orleans.
“As these container ships were going to get bigger and bigger, we would have lost jobs in Louisiana because we couldn’t handle them,” Crowe explained. “That’s why the success of this was so vital. This not only protects the jobs we have here, but opens an entirely new opportunity for us to increase the volume in New Orleans, and in 32 other states up the river.”
Not only will the LIGTT facility be able to unload and load the new larger container ships, but the equipment being built to do that work is going to be the newest, state-of-the-art equipment that will load and unload faster than ever before.
The change to larger container ships was instigated by a $5.3 billion expansion of the Panama Canal, all intended to allow the larger container ships through. Expected to be completed by 2016, it will double the capacity of containers and other products heading through the canal, putting the LIGTT project on time to start accepting the larger container ships by next year.
Crowe additionally pointed out that with more products moving throughout the country by way of water it will cut freight costs by 10 percent, a savings that will ultimately be seen in the price of goods to consumers. However, the trucking industry is not expected to be badly hurt with more products moving on water since there should be an overall increase in the number of products coming through Louisiana and heading up the river.
“There are 14,500 miles of waterways for us to use and it’s cheaper to move products that way, not to mention having fewer trucks on the highways,” he said. “When I took office eight years ago I made this my major project to bring jobs to this state, and we now have it almost ready to happen.”