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Posts published in “Day: August 17, 2013”

Way up in Prince Rupert

August 17, 2013
oregon
RANDY STAPILUS / Washington

The port of Prince Rupert, way up on the coast in Canada, is a growing proposition, a modern and expanding port. But you have to wonder if $109 in savings – over ports to the south in, say, Seattle or Tacoma – is the big reason why.

Here, for example, is the lead of a Tacoma News Tribune story on the subject: “Every big metal container of imported cargo delivered by ship from the growing port of Prince Rupert, B.C., to the American Midwest now enjoys an instant $109 shipping cost advantage over containers imported through U.S. ports such as Tacoma and Seattle, courtesy of the U.S. Government.”

It makes sense for people in Washington to ask the question, and the state's senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, have. And answered it in their new legislation to eliminate the long-standing Harbor Maintenance Tax, which apparently “is not being fully collected” but nonetheless is driving shippers to unload their Pacific goods in either Canada or Mexico, at points far from their ultimate destinations in the United States. They would replace it with a Maritime Goods Movement User Fee, which would, they say, encourage commerce and at the same time generate twice as much revenue.

Would calling it a fee rather than a tax have something to do with it?

Maybe those pieces fit together somehow, but it doesn't seem intuitive.

And there's also this,

You may r may not even have heard of Price Rupert, even if you live in the Northwest – that's how far away it is. It's a smallish city of about 12,500. Services are limited. There's also this: It is approaching as far north of Seattle (about 640 miles) as San Francisco is to its south (about 800). And you can;t get there in anything approaching a straight line – you have to go deep into interior BC to get from the Seattle area to PR.

It's a long way, a very long way, to get product shipped by road from Price Rupert to the population centers of the United States.
A very long way. And the cost of shipping over that distance would surely be a lot more than $109.

Of course, Prince Rupert would seem to make perfect sense as a delivery point for equipment to the Alberta oil fields, equipment shipping and delivery causing so much heartburn in the U.S northwest.

You might think.