By BERNIE WEISENFELD
Courier-Post Staff
The South Jersey Port Corp. is seeking about $15 million to dredge the shipping channel at the tiny Salem Municipal Port, its newest acquisition.
"It's a great challenge, but certain things have to be in place," Joseph Balzano, the port agency's executive director, said Monday. "Most of all, you have to have depth of water."
Balzano discussed plans for the Salem facility during the port agency's annual cruise on the Delaware River. About 450 port customers and public officials took a three-hour tour of the riverfront aboard the Spirit of Philadelphia.
The tour did not go as far south as Salem, which is about 40 miles downriver from Camden.
The port agency, with two docks in Camden, recently signed a two-year lease with purchase option for the Salem River port. The facility, owned by the city of Salem, has been inactive for the past year.
Balzano said his agency is talking with the Delaware River Port Authority and the Delaware River and Bay Authority about funds to deepen Salem's ship channel from its present 16 to 18 feet to 22-24 feet.
That would expand access to the port from shallow-draft barges to small ships with 12,000 to 14,000 tons of cargo, he said.
Including river dredging and other land-based infrastructure improvements, "we're looking at 15 to 16 million dollars to put Salem where it has to be," said Balzano.
In a high-unemployment area like Salem, an active port can make work, Balzano said. "I'm a great believer in waterfront commerce as a generator of jobs."
But the port has spent several million dollars in local and federal funds for improvements over the last decade with little marine trade to show for it.
"There is a . . . cautious attitude," Balzano conceded. "We're going to grow into it. We're going to hire a few people."
He sees Salem as a port of call for Caribbean-bound ships. "The Caribbean trade has small vessels that just can't find their niche in large ports."
Meanwhile, cruise guests were finding few commercial ships at Philadelphia and Camden docks.
"As this ship turns right now, you don't see a ship around, except, of course, the Navy ships," said Balzano. "It's not the way it's supposed to be."
That's of concern to Chris Gardella, president of Chill Fresh, a Philadelphia-based fruit importer.
"There's been a lot of Chilean fruit business that's left the Philadelphia-Camden area," said Gardella. "It's a result of the fact that you find better service and rates in other ports."
"Everybody's just hopeful it will somehow get back to its golden days," said Francis Yetman, general sales manager for Standard Warehouse & Distributing Co., a Pennsauken storage firm.
He called the cruise past dormant and abandoned docks "a sad, nostalgic trip. When I started 27 years ago, every one of these piers was active." To return to that, Yetman ventured, "It would have to be a combination of both states putting money into the port and the (waterfront) unions making concessions."
