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supporting 42,000 jobs and contributing more than $100 million in state and local taxes.

There's a reason northwest now has consistently worked to bring you the latest information about the Port of Tacoma, but with a full blown trade war and state and local budgets tightening, can the port's many improvement initiatives keep their momentum?

That's part of the discussion with the Port of Tacoma and our Steve Higgins, with the story of the port's work to restore traditional salmon habitat around Wampa Creek.

That's next on northwest.

Now.

You.

The Port of Tacoma put out a nicely done state of the port video recently, and I thought it was worth learning more about all of the port's activities.

A beautiful new port, maritime Center is under construction.

One of the buildings will housed Newport business offices and the Port Commission's chambers.

The other building will house the Tacoma Public School District's 253 skills center to help young people get the skills they need to work in the maritime industry and build the area's workforce.

The Blair Waterway is being deepened and widened by six feet because the Puyallup Tribe has entered a partnership with the port to build a new terminal and increase the port's capacity.

S.R.

167 is being connected to I-5 and S.R.

509 to keep trucks moving and open up the off ramps and the streets in the fifth area.

Legacy contamination cleanups are continuing, with lots of salmon habitat being improved, which we'll show you later.

And there are all kinds of clean energy projects underway to use battery powered vehicles moved to clean diesel fuels and add more shore power for ships.

Any company, an institution worth a darn is on a continuous path to improvement, including the port.

But now the policy chaos coming out of Washington, DC and state and local budgets are falling short.

The ability to plan and implement long term projects is being called into question.

Trying to manage their way through all of this, our port director, Eric Johnson, and the longest serving commissioner on the Port Commission, Dick Marzano.

Eric and Dick, thanks so much for coming to northwest now.

Great to have a conversation about the Port of Tacoma and, a lot going on, a lot of great improvements, but also in a very difficult geopolitical situation.

Now, with the trade war, not looming but actually happening.

And so we're going to talk about all of that.

Let's start with trade.

You know, we did about $61 billion in 2023, which are the latest numbers that are available.

That was down 15% or 50% from the previous high.

So the the directional, indicator was always going in the wrong direction.

Now we're in this trade war.

Eric, let's start with you and let's talk turkey.

Do you see a revenue hit coming?

I mean, what do you see coming down the pike?

Yeah.

Tom, thanks for the question.

There's no way to sugarcoat the fact that this is a bad situation, right?

We just, we're a very highly dependent on trade.

The Port of Tacoma.

Obviously, that's what we do.

And when we get into a trade war where we impose tariffs and our trading partners impose retaliatory tariffs, trade goes down, and it's a bad thing.

The revenue hits are uncertain.

We don't know how bad it's going to be or how long it's going to last.

And I don't know anybody who does.

So but all of our lines of business, are going to be affected, and that's not a good thing.

And we can talk a little bit about those different lines of business, and I'm happy to answer questions.

And Commissioner Messina can do the same thing.

But fundamentally we're going to see revenue decreases.

And, we're going to have to manage that.

Dick, as a board member, you know, I can see you being a little conflicted with Holy cow.

Let's just let's shut her down right now.

Let's cut like crazy and get get in the right position for this or.

No, we got a lot of good stuff going on.

Let's not suck all the oxygen out of the room.

Let's see how this plays out.

How do you approach it?

As somebody who's responsible for operations and how how the financial health of the port.

Well, one of the things we're going to make sure we do is continue on where we are right now with the deepening of the Blair Waterway, things of that nature that take so long to get there is still going to be looking at we're going to have to make adjustments as we move, there's no doubt about it.

And with this tariff and with not knowing what's going to happen tomorrow or the next hour for that matter, we're just going to have to be real nimble on our feet.

But if we stop everything we're doing right now, we're just going to be so far behind.

We're never going to catch up.

So we got to keep acting, not reacting, and move forward that way.

How much of how much of the ports traffic.

And I realize this is probably a detailed question, but just ballpark the pie chart.

How much is China?

Because that really seems to be at the end of the day, what this is about.

Can we stand the pain longer than the Chinese economy can?

And that's what we're going to test, I think.

How much of this is China?

Well, China's our number one importer, no doubt.

In fact, is number one importer in the United States.

So it's going to have a drastic effect on what we're doing.

We've already set what we call blank sailings.

And these are shipping lines, have rotating, schedules.

And what happens when you see a blank sailing.

That means basically they avoided your port.

And what we've already seen right now in the United States, we've seen over 80, 80 Blake sailings on the West Coast alone.

And we've seen, we'll figure to see 15 to 20 blank sailings in the month of by the month of May in the Puget Sound area.

So with that comes job loss.

So it's a rippling effect.

What we are seeing because of the 90 day, supposedly, hold off on on the tariffs.

Is that we're getting more cargo coming from Vietnam, Cambodia, things of that nature.

Because China's going there trying to yeah, go there and avoid the tariffs coming from China.

Yeah.

Do you think, Eric, we could get to a point where a ship shows up and the company who should be paying the tab says, you know, don't unload it.

It's not my problem.

I send her back.

I don't think we're going to get to that point, but you get it at the point where the contracts are signed in the cargo or is originally, you know, moves on to the ship, that's where you start to really see the impacts.

And, as I said, we don't know where where this is going to end or how long it's going to last.

I'll give you an example, though, of something that people can relate to just by looking out at the Bay.

One of our key exports is grains.

The group, you see the grain terminal down there on Schuster Parkway.

And, and most of the time when you see a ship anchored out in the harbor, it's a grain ship.

Not usually a container ship.

Used a grain ship waiting for the for a for a berth at the at the grain terminal.

Most of our grain exports are soybeans, and 85% of those go to China.

And so you're going to start seeing fewer ships anchored up in the harbor on a, you know, on a monthly basis.

You'll just see it with your own eyes.

Yeah.

And so, and that's bad for the farmers, obviously, but it's also bad.

Those jobs that come in or the train crews are highly paid.

The tugboat crews are highly paid.

The longshore workers are great jobs.

The marine pilots that bring their ships in and out, it all ripples along.

And you don't want to lose them.

You don't want to lose them.

You don't want to cut them loose early or make some radical change.

And then two months later, oh, gosh.

Well, it's too bad that, you know, now our our good tugboat operators, they've retired, to Montana.

That's right.

We saw some of that during Covid, and it was hard to regain that skilled labor force.

But that's just an example.

Cars are another one.

Yeah.

We import a lot of cars, particularly from Korea.

Our biggest our biggest accounts are like Hyundai and Kia.

Let me throw a number in there.

Good segue.

340,000 yesterday came through the port.

And a lot of that is parts for the Midwest for Honda and Toyota as well.

I mean, good grief.

Yeah, yeah.

We, we believe that these tariffs are going to have a very negative impact on car imports.

Car import car sales are highly dependent upon the interest rates, which have been going up anyways.

Yeah, I cost more money to borrow for a car loan.

And, the kids and Hyundais tend to be entry level vehicles for most people are really good cars.

But as the price goes up from 25 to $30,000 and you got to pay more for the loan, all of a sudden people are going to start buying fewer cars.

And so we're unfortunately expecting that our car imports are probably going to decrease and all the jobs that go along with that.

Yeah.

So, that's just a it's just a function of where we are.

And another reason why we hope that this doesn't last very long.

Yeah.

There's a lot of folks driving those cars on and rolling them on, rolling them off of the road and plus the parts and all that is container work.

What's going on with container traffic?

Well, our container traffic has been pretty stable.

In fact, it's even grown, 12% from, this last month to last year.

But I think we're going to see some downturn in that, we've already seen some exporters, for example, have actually come in and taken containers off the terminal because they can't afford the tariffs that are being charged in China.

So you're going to see more of that.

And, you're seeing less container traffic as far as containers coming in when they used to have maybe 8000 containers are now going to have a lot less of them.

It's going to it's going to have an effect, there's no doubt.

And the real thing that bothers me a lot is the fact that no one knows what's going to happen next.

You know, especially the small to middle class businesses that are trying to survive, you know, from paycheck to paycheck, trying to figure out what they're going to do.

The big companies can take.

They can do, okay.

There's already some that have three months of inventory already, you know, on their shelf they can afford to front load in.

But yeah.

So yeah, let's talk about some of the good stuff that I, that I will couch in and let's make the caveat.

This is the plan.

As we know things right now, things could change.

Talk a little bit about Ericson.

This Newport Maritime Center, you're going to have offices, the two five, three skill center.

I mean, that looks pretty cool.

This is a really, really exciting project.

The we're going to be building a new port administrative office, on the other side of the waterway just south of the Murray Morgan Bridge.

We're doing that in partnership with the Tacoma School District.

We're going to call it the maritime 253 Skills Center.

The port is going to have our offices there, and then the school district is going to have a skill center where kids who high school kids can come in and learn maritime trades.

And this will be kids from all throughout Pierce County, not just the Tacoma School District.

The model is like the school of the Arts, where you can get into the school of the Arts no matter what school district you're in.

This is going to be a similar model, and they're planning to be able to create, job training for the whole panoply of waterfront jobs, not just things like tugboat cruises and things like that, but supply chain logistics issues.

A lot of the jobs in the port are at a desk.

Right.

And so, this is a really exciting project.

It's going to we're going to have, waterfront access.

We're cleaning up the air.

We've already cleaned up a lot of the contaminated centers, actually, almost all of them.

And, this project is just everybody's excited about it.

It's going to transform that area of the of of the, of the town, which is very visible from downtown, from what's now basically a dirt field into a really, really beautiful facility.

So we're pretty happy about it.

The commission deserves a huge amount of credit for their vision on this project, and it's such a great industry to get involved in.

And, you know, every, every couple of dozen kids we can keep from driving up 167 someday, right.

For a family wage job is a good thing.

We've been talking about that for years.

Dick, you mentioned this briefly.

I want you to flesh it out a little bit on the Blair Waterway, a deepening project.

The Puyallup tribe is building a new pier.

You got some break bulk roll on, roll off, 22 acres.

A couple of years worth of work to go into this, talk a little bit about what that project is, what it benefits, how it increases capacity, whatnot.

About 2 or 3 years ago, we had a record number of breakwall cargo.

And that's cargo that doesn't is too big for container.

Your details, your John Deere tractors and stuff.

Well, we worked in, conjunction with the Puyallup Tribe forming an agreement.

They have some property right adjacent to EB one, where our terminal is for the break bulk.

And we formed a partnership to expand that, to make it two berth, available.

And it's going to increase the break bulk, creates more jobs for everything.

And looking at, how we're going to be doing this is deepening the waterway we have in ships right now.

The draft is, is we need more water depth.

So it's it's a 100 and some million dollars project that we're moving forward on.

But it's going to be really good.

And it's really good working with the Puyallup Tribe and moving forward like that without going too deep into the weeds.

And probably a 20 page document.

How does who operates it?

Is it a tribal facility, a port facility?

Both.

How does that how does it work?

It's going to be cooperated.

Basically.

We're going to, you know, we'll get into the finer details as that gets along and stuff.

But it's it's I think the only one of its kind in the nation where a Puyallup tribe and a Port authority has worked together to do something like this.

Yeah, it's a really exciting project, Tom.

And and, it's worth really emphasizing the partnership with the Puyallup Tribe, which is, as Dick said, really unprecedented as far as I know.

And a long time, a long time coming up, the tribe, got a fair amount of property there, many, many acres as part of the land claim settlement 35 years ago.

And, we're finally working in partnership with them to basically, develop and use that land cooperatively.

So, we own the property that used to be for, for the listeners who have good memories.

That used to be the Kaiser aluminum plant, okay.

Down there that the port bought many years ago.

That's a big auto import facility and also break bulk.

And, there is we believe there's more business that we can capture in this gateway if we have two terminals.

And so we're going to have one terminal and the tribe's going to have another terminal.

It's going to be one long dock, it's going to look the same.

And we're doing something that's a little bit different.

You don't see very often.

We're actually widening the Blair Waterway as well as deepening it.

So deepening projects is deepening.

Projects are relatively common.

Widening projects are not.

So we're actually going to be making the Blair Waterway a little bit wider so that we can get have ships on both sides and a ship down the middle.

Okay.

When the wind's blowing.

Yep.

And so, that's going to be a big, big project.

We're just starting it now.

In fact, we've already started the very, very beginning pieces of it.

And, it's going to lead to some real great opportunities down there in the clean sediments that are coming out of the Blair, which most of them are clean, by the way, we're going to be using to create some habitat along Marine View Drive to increase, the salmon habitat out there.

The tribes are excited about that.

And then we are too.

So it's really a win win.

Yeah.

Project.

Yeah.

When we think of the port, obviously a lot of people think of a circle on a map.

But one of the reasons I think the point is port is so important is if there are concentric circles going out from the port in terms of area of influence, one of them being and Eric used the word the gateway project, you know, fingers crossed.

Again, on 167.

We have a state budget that's got problems.

We have a federal budget that's got problems.

So you've got 167 and the sub area plan that just happened, for the tides.

Let's talk about how those ideas tie together.

And is this going to happen?

It has if this was what I'd be knocking.

But the reality is yeah, it's going to happen.

One of the things that the legislature did is made sure that the funding of 167 was complete, which was really critically important.

It's one of the few mega projects, in the state, if not the only mega project where they had contributions from so many different segments.

Yeah.

Port of Tacoma.

Port of Seattle both contributed $30 million each.

The city of Puyallup, the city of five, city of Tacoma working together to make sure that that took place.

And it's going to be really good for all the commuters.

It's not just moving freight, but also moving people.

There's going to be a big lifestyle.

I think improvement that comes along with it.

Oh, most definitely for just folks.

Yes, most definitely.

They're going to see that.

And like I say, I'm I'm very optimistic that this is going to get done.

It's something that we need it.

It's been 30 years in the making.

You know when that when they did 167, they said, oh we'll take care of it next year.

Yeah.

But next year or 30 years down the road.

Yeah.

That's right.

And Commissioner Marzano has been involved in that, I believe the entire 30 years.

I was pretty close, a long time.

It's our highest transportation priority.

We believe that we're, at the goal line.

And, the legislature is going to come through, and, you mentioned the sub area plan, Tom.

A huge amount of it's a land use planning process, you know, pretty dense, a little bit dull, but super important because we have we needed a way to protect the industrial lands in the tide flats.

You just don't get them back once they if they convert to something like housing, that's just really not good for the economy, their region.

And so Commissioner Marzano and Commissioner Keller and others worked very, very hard with the city of Tacoma and others, including the tribe, the county, the city of Fife, to get that subarea plan into a spot where we had a unanimous vote from all five governments, to move forward with it.

It's at the planning Commission at the city.

Now.

We're hoping that the City Council approves it later this year, but a lot of work in that.

But the point was, we wanted to create predictable, long term industrial land policy for this region, and we think we did it.

Yeah.

Talk a little.

Let's talk about the environment to which I know is something you guys have put a lot of time and energy into.

First, though, I'm going to explain to me a little bit because it's complex.

There was a recent court ruling that said, it was kind of like trying to test the idea of whether, operators of at the port were responsible for their runoff water and pollution or no, the port is responsible.

You know, they're the parent organization.

And the courts apparently said that, no, the port, the ports are responsible for that.

What does that affect?

What was the meaning of that ruling and what does it mean going forward?

Well, we're still going to clean up the port, still going to be, cleaning up our stormwater, making sure that that's taken care of with regards to the leases that we have with terminal operators, we have some there that say that they are responsible.

Then the port will in turn look to the terminal operator for reimbursement.

Whether or not we can get that or we have to go to court, however that may play out, we're not sure, but the port will always take care of that stormwater.

That's something that we're we've done.

We're historically, I think if you look in the historical things that we've done with regards to environmental cleanup and, and habitat restoration, I think we could challenge anybody on what our record is.

Yeah.

And I and I hear you say, I hear that I think the big question was who's ultimately responsible?

Because, you know, you get you get a terminal operator in the port doing this now.

Yeah.

All of a sudden, who's the deep pocket.

What are your thoughts on that Eric.

Well, it's a very complicated area, as you pointed out, because the water tends to mingle together.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

And you also end up in an area where the scuppers at the, at the terminal are hard to capture the water on, right, because it runs down through.

So you get a lot of arguing about who's going to do what.

And the EPA and the and the state don't always agree on that.

By the way.

Sometimes the EPA tells us one thing.

The Department of Ecology tells us a different thing.

And so we try to shorten all that out.

But we're sorting it out.

And we believe that we're going to get that, that situation taken care of pretty successfully.

We as Dick said, we have a very sophisticated water quality program.

We capture and treat almost all the stormwater that we that that the rain's on us.

And, and we're proud of the efforts that we've done.

So we're, we we're going to get all that sorted out.

Other environmental things.

Long list net zero by 2040 EV fleet for some of the vehicles on the port property.

Renewable diesel.

You're looking at $500 million for zero carbon tech at the port.

Is that money in jeopardy?

Some of those plans, how do they how do they look going forward?

Well, it's it's really a very expensive proposition, but we're going to strive to get there.

We're trying to work with our terminal operators because the fact is, they own the equipment.

That's that's on the terminal.

So we've got to somehow convince them that they got to be partially responsible for that.

I would say the federal government should be helping us with that, too.

Yeah, but with what's happening right now in the federal government, it's hard to say which way they're going to go again.

Yeah.

If there's a decision order that clean that clean program with that money.

So yeah, we we should have mentioned that, you know, our terminals are most of them are operated by the Northwest Seaport Alliance, which is a which is a commercial partnership between the Port of Seattle in the port.

And they have had a long term plan of electrifying their terminals so that when the oceangoing ships come in, they can plug in and turn off.

Right.

They're they're up there, they're, emissions.

And, we started to that, investment in Tacoma at the tote terminal.

Then we moved north.

We put it at terminal five, which is West Seattle.

Then we came back and we just got done putting one in the Husky terminal, which is the biggest terminal we've got with the blue and white striped cranes out at the end.

They're just in the process of getting that, in the final stages of operation now and then, the plan is to move north again up to Seattle to Terminal 18, which is Harbor Island.

So we've had a a sharing that infrastructure investment.

We're concerned about the federal, contribution.

This administration has been pretty clear that electrification and climate, issues are not a priority for them.

Yep.

We still get some state money, which is good.

And, we're just going to continue planning for that and investing in that infrastructure.

We can't just stop on that.

Yeah, we just have to proceed.

But it's also give you an idea of the cost factor we're looking at when we first started the Shore Power.

And what we're thinking about is somewhere in the neighbor, 15 to $20 million per terminal.

Well, we just got realized that one terminal in Seattle is going to be 80 some million dollars.

And, you know, when you look at that, you're trying to wait.

We're going to continue doing it, don't get me wrong.

But we can't do it alone.

We need partners.

That's right.

Yeah.

We're also at the Port of Tacoma starting a pilot program for, electrification of trucks, charging stations.

Right.

For trucks.

That's new.

Trucks have always been a little bit more difficult to have electric than vehicles, smaller vehicles.

But we're starting that process.

We're putting in some charging stations.

We're working with the private sector to incent them to buy electric trucks.

And so that's something that we're proceeding with as well.

Yeah.

You look forward into the future and you see a new port facility out there.

Electrification, ocean widening, deepening new facilities, environmental clean up.

I mean, you can see it all.

It's just a matter of getting there.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah.

I tell people where the where the most visible and least understood part of the economy.

Everybody sees us.

We're right in the middle of the fishbowl.

Ships go in, ships go out, trains move around.

But most people don't have any idea what we're actually doing down there.

But it's not a secret.

We do bus tours every month.

We do a boat tour, every year, usually in August.

Our website is full of information.

I'd encourage you to go to it.

We do a state of the port report.

We're try to be as transparent as possible with all the things that are going on down there.

Hit me with the website, port tacoma.com.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

I want to make sure.

Want to make sure we get the shameless plug.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, we really do have a lot of information to share.

Oh, yeah.

And so we try very hard to do it.

We we don't want to, we know that we're visible to everybody, and people care about us.

Yeah, people, like, people are interested in the fact they like the fact that they live in a port town.

Right?

They think it's interesting.

I get asked questions all the time about, you know, what's that?

What's on that ship?

I have to tell him.

I have no idea what, but, I can usually guess, but, there's just a huge amount of support in the community for the port.

People want us to succeed.

And, we feel really proud of the fact that we can be the institution that we are for all the people that live here.

Well, great conversation, guys.

We'll we'll end it on that.

I appreciate you coming to northwest now.

And, give us an update on the Port of Tacoma.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

Now let's talk about the ports.

Environment.

Federal, state, local and tribal governments all have a role in salmon habitat restoration here in western Washington.

And as Steve Kidman's tells us now, so does the Port of Tacoma as it works along the shores of Wahpeton Creek.

Before Tacoma could become the city of Destiny.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says old photographs and maps showed there may have been as many as 6000 acres of marshes and tide in surrounding the mouth of the Puyallup River.

But the 1870s trains were destined for Tacoma.

Commerce was booming in the Washington Territory.

It brought jobs and wealth and pollution.

By 1999, there were less than 200 acres of those lands left.

But now those numbers are growing.

It's also about being a really good environmental steward, and the Port of Tacoma is really leading the way.

There.

The trickling waters of Lobdell Creek once again meander through wetlands and fish habitat.

These restored acres are part of an advanced mitigation project.

The Puyallup Tribe of Indians partnering alongside the Port of Tacoma.

Not only are you restoring it to its original, shape and condition, but you're also creating flood capacity.

So when we get these crazy, you know, hundred year storms and things like this, this will fill up like a bathtub and, retain flood water that normally would have been on the streets and things like that, and then metered back out, into commencement Bay here.

Harbor Creek was once cut down into a roadside ditch.

Now there's a bridge where culverts used to keep salmon from returning to spawn.

Plus, thousands of new plants join mature trees along the shore, taking it back to what it used to look like back when the port was born in 1918.

It started on 240 acres.

Here's what it looked like back in the 1950s.

But ever since it started, it's grown tenfold.

Since 1980.

The port says it's preserved, constructed, or helped to mitigate 21 sites filling 213 acres.

Many of those projects highlight Nearby place of circling waters restores multiple habitats for salmon bearing Halibut Creek.

The lessons Port of Tacoma learned here a decade ago became a blueprint for what Battle Creek and future projects already in the works.

It's vindicating.

It's gratifying.

It's, so rewarding.

You know, we can model this stuff.

We can study this stuff.

We can hope that the fish come back.

But when you actually see them in the water and you see them jumping, and then you realize that they might be endangered.

Fish that you're really trying to bring back.

It's it's one of the most gratifying things about my job.

Port Tacoma.

Steve Higgins, northwest.

Now.

Americans have taken the idea of stability for granted, and the seemingly increasing pace of periods of instability are causing us all a lot of stress.

The bottom line let's hope that the truly worthy projects like port expansion, the completion of highway 167, the gradual improvement and remediation of the environment, and the investments in this area's workforce can all continue uninterrupted.

My ty sk ttot ofTPort of Tacomaof artaciicipatingaiigtiistprogrmmv typarg.tI hopytthihiprngoamfgotl tcnk fi.dY u cathfind isigapr gromt web at kbtc.org, stream it through the PBS app, er liPtBn onpSpo,ifyoandlAppse Podctsts.

Thnt'ifgoy ganoAdp iePforcs.is ditiat goi oro wis .tNiw s tildnixt tome,hI'm.TNo Lay tnt time, I'm Tom Larsen.

Thanks for watching.

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