A Miami-based company is already looking at the planned Heartland Port as a potential site from where they could operate.
Heartland Port Authority Board Chair Rick Mihalevich said during a Tuesday meeting that American Patriot Holdings has shown in public presentations ports in Kansas City and Jefferson City as places where they would target. One of those meetings, which Mihalevich and other Heartland Port Authority members attended, involved leaders with the Missouri Department of Transportation, Missouri Department of Agriculture and other state agriculture trade groups.
Heartland Port Authority board member Roger Fischer was also at the meeting and said among the reasons for the company looking at Jefferson City is its status as one of the few state capitals in the country located on a river and its access to four-lane highways.
Nearly a year ago, APH CEO Sal Litrico came to Jefferson City to talk about his company’s proposal for a fleet of inland waterway vessels the company wants to build to ferry goods up and down the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. At 100 feet wide and 595 feet long, APH ships designed for the Mississippi River’s tributaries could ferry goods from Jefferson City to ports in Kansas City and Louisiana.
Once the Heartland Port is built — currently proposed for southern Jefferson City adjacent to the Missouri National Guard Ike Skelton Training Facility and near the Jefferson City Area Chamber of Commerce’s existing industrial park — APH would look to get three memorandums of understanding from companies to pick up their goods every two weeks, Mihalevich said.
Litrico said last year the ports they’ll need should be built with future technologies in mind, and port authority members have said the Heartland Port will be designed to adapt to future uses.
Heartland Port Authority officials said it could take anywhere from two to five years to get the port in operation.
To do so will require the Missouri Legislature to pass legislation transferring the land at the National Guard site from the state to the port authority. Such a bill was making its way through this past legislative session, but it failed to make it out of the Legislature despite reportedly having no opposition. Supporters have promised to bring another land transfer bill up in the 2020 legislative session.
‘Super levee’ reconsidered
In other business Tuesday, Mihalevich said there is renewed local interest in what some have tabbed as a “super levee” that was proposed in the early 2000s after the floods of 1993 and 1995.
The 5-mile-long levee would have been located along the northern front of the river. It would have been 43.9 feet — 13.9 feet taller than the 30-foot Capital View Levee that sits in that area and 5.3 feet taller than the crest of the 1993 flood, which was more than 38 feet.
The levee was projected to cost $26 million, with 35 percent of those funds coming from a local sponsor and the other 65 percent coming from the federal government.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials said the plans were 95 percent complete when they stopped in 2002 because no local sponsor could be found to fund the levee and agree to do the upkeep.
Mihalevich said the Corps has said the levee could still be done if a local sponsor could be found and, according to Mihalevich, there are groups looking at putting together the funds.
How this might affect the efforts on the port was unclear, but Mihalevich said it appears the effort is being considered as way to bring a new area for potential economic development to Jefferson City.
The port authority did take one action of note Tuesday, approving asking the three governmental entities that formed the port — the Jefferson City Council along with the Cole County and Callaway County commissions — to come up with a total of $1,500 to help the Missouri Port Authority Association pay for a lobbyist for the association.
The association already has the funds, thanks to money from other port authorities, to pay for StateLine Strategies, which has offices in Jefferson City and Kansas City. Heartland Port Authority board members, though, felt they needed to show although this port is not in operation yet, they still backed the efforts to help ports get support in the Missouri Legislature.