Cassidy Point

[Portlander]

Highlights from today's Portland Press Herald article.

 

[Portlander]

As long as the 600' pier can be brought back up to standards and used for transporting cargo and other maritime related purposes I would have no issues with a zoning change. The PPH is reviving a perennial debate over the future of Portland Harbor as they do with any new project that doesn't fit their agenda. Find a few disgruntled longshoreman and stir the pot which I guess in fairness is what the local media is supposed to do.

 

[PWMFlyer]

We have had this debate for over 50 years. What defines a working waterfront? I would say at least 90% of the waterfront is marine related. This is not the condo craze of the 80's when Michael Liberty built Chandlers Wharf. Merrills/Sprague has not seen the activity it has seen since the 80s/90s. Paper mills are shutting down, which the big rolls were always shipped out of Portland. Searsport now does the majority of that business. One of the warehouses has been dismantled due to lack of business. The salt ship will go somewhere else, leaving no scheduled ships for the dock. This is why the longshoreman are worried... its just a changing industry that they need to adapt.

 

[mainejeff]

We have had this debate for over 50 years. What defines a working waterfront? I would say at least 90% of the waterfront is marine related. This is not the condo craze of the 80's when Michael Liberty built Chandlers Wharf. Merrills/Sprague has not seen the activity it has seen since the 80s/90s. Paper mills are shutting down, which the big rolls were always shipped out of Portland. Searsport now does the majority of that business. One of the warehouses has been dismantled due to lack of business. The salt ship will go somewhere else, leaving no scheduled ships for the dock. This is why the longshoreman are worried... its just a changing industry that they need to adapt.

And it's easier to find a boogeyman to blame than to accept reality.

 

[TC_zoid]

Renovation illustration for White Stadium in Roxbury (Boston) for women's soccer starting in 2028. 11,000 seats at $325 million! You sure you can get something similar for $50 million at Cassidy Point?

 

[MarkHB]

Ethan Strimling has a piece opposing the stadium proposal. Of note: apparently Sprague was bought out by a hedge fund a couple of years ago, so it's entirely possible that they've let business go fallow to make a bigger profit flipping the property.

 

[mainejeff]

The political climate in this country does not lend itself to this site becoming an expanded shipping port. Is someone planning on securing non-existent Federal funds to improve this site after the coal is cleaned up? Don't look for any help from the EPA....they don't exist anymore. Maybe Canada can help out......errr.....forget about that one. No one wants a coal pile...no one wants a soccer stadium. Just what the f*ck do they want at this site that is economically sustainable?

 

[Portlander]

Portland Press Herald article

 

[cranewatch]

The political climate in this country does not lend itself to this site becoming an expanded shipping port. Is someone planning on securing non-existent Federal funds to improve this site after the coal is cleaned up? Don't look for any help from the EPA....they don't exist anymore. Maybe Canada can help out......errr.....forget about that one. No one wants a coal pile...no one wants a soccer stadium. Just what the f*ck do they want at this site that is economically sustainable?

How about this: A soccer stadium that maintains the commercial piers and access. Middle ground in our polarized world? Good idea Hearts of Pine!

 

[MarkHB]

How about this: A soccer stadium that maintains the commercial piers and access. Middle ground in our polarized world? Good idea Hearts of Pine!

I think the question there is, is it reasonable to put a large, public-facing attraction in the midst of a heavy industrial facility that operates on its own timetable (no guaranteeing that bulk cargo ships won't need to unload during games)? Particularly when the current owners of the facility (the hedge fund) may be more interested in flipping the property than operating a bulk cargo pier?

Portland has put far too much time and effort into preserving its working waterfront for this to go in without serious scrutiny.

 

[PWMFlyer]

Bulk Cargo is a dying industry here in Portland. Most of the Bulk Cargo business has moved to Searsport and to Eastport. Now with CP and CN operating in Maine, most of the loads are north of Portland. One shed has already been dismantled on site; the others are barely used.

 

[MarkHB]

Bulk Cargo is a dying industry here in Portland. Most of the Bulk Cargo business has moved to Searsport and to Eastport. Now with CP and CN operating in Maine, most of the loads are north of Portland. One shed has already been dismantled on site; the others are barely used.

I think my question there is, did the loads diminish because of changing business considerations, or because the hedge fund owners were letting it die by attrition because they wanted to flip the land? And was the moribund ownership of Pan Am Railways (since replaced by CSX) also a factor?

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

I think my question there is, did the loads diminish because of changing business considerations, or because the hedge fund owners were letting it die by attrition because they wanted to flip the land? And was the moribund ownership of Pan Am Railways (since replaced by CSX) also a factor?

Pan Am definitely didn't give a shit about Cassidy Point or Yard 8 transloads, despite whatever lip service they may have provided when Yard 8 was being built by the state. Yard 8's business prospects were oversold by the state to an absurd degree, so the expectations didn't exactly match the business reality either. CSX has been very quiet about doing anything there, so that may underscore the misfire of expectations. Or they're just waiting for the state to make the first move, not seeing a lot of heavy-lifting of their own moving the needle.

Searsport is shrinking big under CPKC. They do a fraction of the rail business that predecessor Central Maine & Quebec did, and have cut the number of days they operate down there dramatically such that they're only getting down there from Bangor once or twice a week. And they're letting the condition of the Searsport Branch go to shit maintenance-wise, which may telegraph what they think about the long-term future. Since there's no evidence of an offsetting boom in truck traffic to push back against the rail losses, it's hard to conclude that that port is doing well. I don't know about Eastport (although the state has largely backed off its pie-in-sky study fixation with reactivating the rail corridor down there), but it's also hard to believe that that port is really happenin' when the truck route down ME 190 is so bottlenecked by the one-way-in/one-way-out access. It's got a pretty low ceiling as presently constituted...if it's even reaching that ceiling.

The sagging fortunes of the state's bulk cargo ports tend to point to top-down planning misfires and rudderlessness more than anything else. It's something that can be fixed, and thus they shouldn't throw the asset completely away, but Maine really has not shown they have a clue what they're doing with the overall operation of these places.

 

[mainejeff]

What does the container industry look like up and down the East Coast? Why would they unload container ships in Maine so they can send all of the goods South? I bet that ports in the Mid-Atlantic and maybe Virginia are booming....the goods are unloaded much closer to their final destination. Portland can either have a soccer stadium......or a piece of waterfront land that just sits there for another few decades.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

What does the container industry look like up and down the East Coast? Why would they unload container ships in Maine so they can send all of the goods South? I bet that ports in the Mid-Atlantic and maybe Virginia are booming....the goods are unloaded much closer to their final destination. Portland can either have a soccer stadium......or a piece of waterfront land that just sits there for another few decades.

Maine's not a point of origin for containers. That's in large part why Yard 8 was stillborn; the state miscalculated badly that they could get into that action. Even Massachusetts doesn't bother with ship-to-rail intermodal, with Port of Boston's container port being laser-focused on truck trips in a local trucker shift's radius. Something like that focus might've been appropriate for Greater Portland if they templated Massport's Conley Terminal on a somewhat smaller scale, but it would have to be really supremely well-managed to make a tangible difference within its niche. And...well....Maine's ports really aren't that well-managed as a whole. The state studies things left-and-right, but they are largely clueless on how to implement any of the recommendations.

CSX is, however, building the infrastructure at Rigby Yard in South Portland to make Maine a bigger endpoint for containers that are shipped by rail from much bigger ports and transcontinentally. Maine's never really had that before with St. John intermodal on CPKC treating Maine completely as flyover country and St. Lawrence & Atlantic RR's past attempt at an Auburn intermodal ramp being largely a flop because they just didn't move enough carloads from their Class I interchanges in Montreal to pull it off. The CSX behemoth will start with terminating single-stack trains sending cube trucks out of Rigby when they remake the derelict west side of the yard into unloading pads, and ultimately they'll end with double-stacked cube trains arriving from both Albany points-west and St. John once the cross-state rail clearances are upgraded. That's ultimately the long-term, big-enchilada payoff they bought Pan Am for, and it'll be as big a deal for the local shipping industry as CSX-Worcester and Norfolk Southern-Ayer intermodal was for Massachusetts and the local trucking industry in Massachusetts. And it really doesn't require a lot of local/state gov't 'vision thing' mojo to take off, either...just a general spirit of cooperation with CSX (which the state has got to be over-the-moon about after 4 decades of fighting with Pan Am) and political willingness to petition the federal government for freight rail upgrade grants.


Bulk cargo, by contrast, has much more need for localized ports. If you're transporting aggregates or fuel or grain or chemicals you're not going to be taking up space on PanMAX ships or necessarily calling on the very largest ports. There's a definite market for middle- and small-sized ports. That's the role Searsport and Eastport are supposed to be filling, but are largely failing to because they're so halfassed managed and so constrained by the out-of-the-wayness of their ground transportation arteries. Cassidy Point is definitely very attractive real estate for augmenting them because it's a 5 minute switcher trip from the biggest Class I freight rail yard in New England and right by all the highways while Searsport and Eastport have definite ceilings on what their respective truck and rail routes will support. I mean, hell, Portsmouth, NH is a grower for that function; why not Portland? But if the state is going to halfass their whole ports portfolio that potential is largely going to be (and so far has been) foresaken. I don't know if that means the right answer is just giving up the land for commercial and recreational development forever, because that's just waving the white flag for all time whereas *some* sort of 'vision thing' kick-in-the-pants could get the state in short time managing its portfolio better. But the current path of spending state money unwisely (e.g. Yard 8) while providing little to no steering for the overarching business plan clearly isn't working at all, and clearly is going to lead to a whole lot more nothing at these port properties the longer that lackadaisical status quo rules.

 

[Redfern]

Maine's not a point of origin for containers. That's in large part why Yard 8 was stillborn; the state miscalculated badly that they could get into that action. Even Massachusetts doesn't bother with ship-to-rail intermodal, with Port of Boston's container port being laser-focused on truck trips in a local trucker shift's radius. Something like that focus might've been appropriate for Greater Portland if they templated Massport's Conley Terminal on a somewhat smaller scale, but it would have to be really supremely well-managed to make a tangible difference within its niche. And...well....Maine's ports really aren't that well-managed as a whole. The state studies things left-and-right, but they are largely clueless on how to implement any of the recommendations.

CSX is, however, building the infrastructure at Rigby Yard in South Portland to make Maine a bigger endpoint for containers that are shipped by rail from much bigger ports and transcontinentally. Maine's never really had that before with St. John intermodal on CPKC treating Maine completely as flyover country and St. Lawrence & Atlantic RR's past attempt at an Auburn intermodal ramp being largely a flop because they just didn't move enough carloads from their Class I interchanges in Montreal to pull it off. The CSX behemoth will start with terminating single-stack trains sending cube trucks out of Rigby when they remake the derelict west side of the yard into unloading pads, and ultimately they'll end with double-stacked cube trains arriving from both Albany points-west and St. John once the cross-state rail clearances are upgraded. That's ultimately the long-term, big-enchilada payoff they bought Pan Am for, and it'll be as big a deal for the local shipping industry as CSX-Worcester and Norfolk Southern-Ayer intermodal was for Massachusetts and the local trucking industry in Massachusetts. And it really doesn't require a lot of local/state gov't 'vision thing' mojo to take off, either...just a general spirit of cooperation with CSX (which the state has got to be over-the-moon about after 4 decades of fighting with Pan Am) and political willingness to petition the federal government for freight rail upgrade grants.


Bulk cargo, by contrast, has much more need for localized ports. If you're transporting aggregates or fuel or grain or chemicals you're not going to be taking up space on PanMAX ships or necessarily calling on the very largest ports. There's a definite market for middle- and small-sized ports. That's the role Searsport and Eastport are supposed to be filling, but are largely failing to because they're so halfassed managed and so constrained by the out-of-the-wayness of their ground transportation arteries. Cassidy Point is definitely very attractive real estate for augmenting them because it's a 5 minute switcher trip from the biggest Class I freight rail yard in New England and right by all the highways while Searsport and Eastport have definite ceilings on what their respective truck and rail routes will support. I mean, hell, Portsmouth, NH is a grower for that function; why not Portland? But if the state is going to halfass their whole ports portfolio that potential is largely going to be (and so far has been) foresaken. I don't know if that means the right answer is just giving up the land for commercial and recreational development forever, because that's just waving the white flag for all time whereas *some* sort of 'vision thing' kick-in-the-pants could get the state in short time managing its portfolio better. But the current path of spending state money unwisely (e.g. Yard 8) while providing little to no steering for the overarching business plan clearly isn't working at all, and clearly is going to lead to a whole lot more nothing at these port properties the longer that lackadaisical status quo rules.

what is Yard 8? Is that the cold storage facility? ~ C

 

[Portlander]

I was unsure myself and found this.

 

[Portlander]

While we're on the subject of rail and port facilities. My grandfather worked for the Maine Central Railroad at Rigby Yard for close to 50 years and retired as a track foreman and I recall visits with him to the yard as a kid. My grandparents lived just up the hill from Rigby in Thornton Heights so my grandfather was able to walk to work on most days. Found this article from 1923 and I never realized how large Rigby actually was and the massive impact it had for the railroad industry in Maine and that the land was previously a park with a horse racing track and large grandstand.

 

[PWMFlyer]

Portland Terminal Co controlled the switching etc..

 

[Redfern]

This is very helpful. So does that mean Cassidy Point is part of various parcels of land that make up the entire area designated “Yard 8”. Also when were all of these Yards designated??? Love the personal stories!! ~ C