Port Districts Fighting Was Not Part Of The Plan

Port districts, like parishes and cities, are political subdivisions of the state. Though members of management boards are chosen geographically, their duty is by law to the all the people of Louisiana.

Naturally their regional and parochial interests become driving factors in their decisions, but there must be a mechanism to ensure that such decisions meet the needs of the people of the state. With this in mind in 2012 I passed legislation to create the Louisiana Board of International Commerce. The charge for this Board was to create a Master Plan for how Louisiana applies its tremendous maritime assets to benefit all our people by allowing the state to strategically compete in international trade. The spine of the legislation was a mandate that proposed development must demonstrate alignment with the plan.

Unfortunately, the state has not taken advantage of the opportunities of using the legislation to develop global strategies within which the state and its subdivisions should operate. The result is continued infighting between Port Districts that will always result, not in any growth of business or jobs, but just in carving up a shrinking pie of business activity, as reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.

At the beginning of my career the Lower Mississippi River Region was known as the Gateway to the Americas and New Orleans as the Queen City of the South. By metrics today Mobile moves around 1 million containers, New Orleans about 450,000. While in the past two decades Savanna has gone from 2 million to now 6 million. New Orleans once home to many major banks, is now home to none. Miami and Houston are clearly the Gateways to the Americas.

Let me translate those unfortunate metrics into understandable facts. While political leaders don’t appreciate or just ignore opportunities such as international trade, we have lost tens of thousands of prosperity creating jobs. While leaders ignore American economic realities and instead focus on social policies that drive away business, we sink ever deeper into poverty and social ills. So, though it will never be admitted, by simple metrics what leadership has been doing has failed. The discouraging fact is it has demonstrated a lower standard of living for our people and has triggered the well documented outmigration of our best and brightest.

So how would we do fix correct our downward trajectory? One element must be recapturing our rightful place in world commerce.

First, we accept the reality that it took a long time to lose our economic base and it will take a long, committed time to regain it. Next, we stop the parochial logic often exhibited by regional management boards, and we abandon dependency on “if we build, they will come” follies. Then we commit to a regional, the Lower Mississippi port complex as a whole and the major cities and industries therein, strategy of investment and planning based on global realities.

The elemental precepts of a workable Master Plan must be growth of traditional water born commerce, development of value-added operations, distribution, and transportation, and attraction of corporate business and banking. And all of this must be viewed through a lens that eliminates arbitrary political boundaries.

The sad fact is that most political leaders do not possess any background in commerce. So, they naively nod their head in approval when talk turns to economic growth, especially of ports, and then they go right back to pursuing policies that are an anathema to business in general. Ports in and of themselves are not the end result, they are only the catalyst for a diversified regional economy. That’s what leaders must understand.

The controversy brewing over the purchase of the Avondale Shipyard site without any attempt to fulfill any form of state level strategy creates an opportunity to revisit how we can turn our maritime history and assets into real spending power for the average citizen of our state. Let me repeat this in a different way, the rising tide lifts all boats. If the state economy improves then all citizens no matter their economic strata improve. But that vision depends on taking steps that have rarely been taken by leadership at all levels of our state.

Opportunity prevails only if logic and strategy override political expediency.