Sound Stories. Sound Voices.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
You are on the KUOW archive site. Click here to go to our current site.

Tacoma, Seattle Ports Join Forces To Take On Canada

Courtesy Port of Seattle

After decades of competing for cargo business, the ports of Seattle and Tacoma are forming an unlikely alliance to fight new competitors.

The ports have been struggling with sudden sea changes. Shipping companies are themselves forming alliances and combining cargo into gigantic ships that will be discriminating in their choice of ports.

Puget Sound ports need to be the stand-outs that get the business, even as the smaller of the large ships can choose to dodge them altogether through the expanded Panama Canal.

Puget Sound port terminals are not yet ready to receive the mega-ships, and they are already losing business to Canadian ports.

“We don't know what that impact will have on (Pacific Northwest) ports at this point,” said Clare Petrich, commission president of the Port of Tacoma. “But we want to be prepared and we want to be working successfully together."

Tacoma and Seattle have lost ground to Canadian ports such as Metro Vancouver and Prince Rupert, which are profiting from Canadian government investments in roads and rails. It takes less time to ship goods to the U.S. East Coast from Vancouver, B.C. than it does by an American rail route.

The ports say joining forces will give them more heft when they approach railroads about improvements.

An economic impact study by the ports indicates that economic activity connected with the combined Puget Sound gateway equals $138 billion, or around a third of Washington State’s gross domestic product. Port commissioners said that kind of economic heft may help their case in Olympia, which remains at an impasse over a transportation funding package.

Under the arrangement, which is subject to federal approval, the ports will not merge. Their managements will make strategic decisions together, such as deciding which terminals will be upgraded for which types of ships, and where dredging needs to take place first. Each port will also keep its own name and assets.

The stakes are high, Port of Seattle commissioner Bill Bryant said in an interview. The agreement ends a rivalry that was going to hurt both ports.

"Since the founding of the two cities, they've been competing against each other and there's been this built-in competition between the ports as well,” Bryant said. “What we realized is that the old ways of doing business was going to cost us jobs."