FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Port Authority To Buy Former Military Ocean Terminal

In Bayonne In Effort To Expand Ports

Article Taken From Star-Ledger: June 24, 2010 By Steve Strunsky

Researched By: Regina Townes

(A 1997 aerial view of Military Ocean Terminal, Bayonne.)

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is buying a huge chunk of the former Military Ocean Terminal at Bayonne and all of the Global Terminal container port in Jersey City as part of a plan to ensure the future growth of the region's ports. City officials have approved the sale of the 130-acre site to Port Authority.

Under terms of the deal disclosed by the Port Authority, Bayonne will receive payments totaling $235 million spread over 24 years, including $135 million for the 130 acres of Ocean Terminal, plus almost 100 underwater acres surrounding the peninsula. The agency will pay the city another $100 million for permanent roadway easements to assure that trucks and other vehicles always have access to the site. Bayonne officials gave preliminary approval to the deal. Global Terminal's current owners will continue to operate the container port under a lease with the Port Authority, which will own the 98-acre property.

For Bayonne, the Marine Terminal sale is a reversal of its original plan for the site, renamed the Peninsula at Bayonne in 2002, after it bought the land from the Department of Defense. Bayonne envisioned the two-mile-long peninsula - with its breathtaking views of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Verrazano Bridge and Staten Island - as a residential community, with some commercial and recreational amenities, to set it apart from the industrial uses that had long dominated the city's waterfront. Because of a weak economy, a depressed housing market and other reasons, plans for the peninsula have changed.

"In light of the problem they've been having with the Bayonne Bridge, this facility would be an ideal solution," said Christopher Patella, Executive Director of the Bayonne Local Redevelopment Authority. The bridge's widely publicized problem is its 151-foot clearance above the Kill Van Kull, which limits the size of container ships headed to the Port Newark/Elizabeth Marine Terminal container complex, and Staten Island's Howland Hook Terminal. Officials fear thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in commerce could be lost to competing ports as skyscraping container ships from Asian arrive at East Coast ports once an expansion of the Panama Canal is completed in 2014. The solution Patella was suggesting was that large container ships could simply put in at a new Bayonne peninsula terminal or the expanded Global Terminal.