Mixing business with pleasure: Northrop Grumman’s Lee Wilson (left) and the Port’s Dirk Mathiasen say San Diego needs to protect its maritime trade operations. (photo/lambertphoto.com)

Sailboats bob on the bay while street performers strum guitars. Waiters set steaming plates before diners on outdoor patios. Cruise ships decorated with multi-colored flags vie for attention with the sails and rigging of the Star of India. San Diego’s Embarcadero is surely one of the most scenic spots in the city.

Just south of the San Diego Convention Center, though, the scenery changes dramatically — massive tankers and freighters belly up to concrete wharves, where all cargo is loaded on and off. Railroad lines criss-cross roads bordered by tall chain-link fences, giving access to freight cars and tractor-trailer rigs that haul goods back and forth. Farther south from the Port of San Diego’s 10th Avenue Marine Terminal, cranes and docks sprout from shipyards, and the National City Marine Terminal is awash in new imported cars.

This is San Diego Bay’s “working waterfront,” where hard hats and steel-toed boots are more common than sandals and sunscreen. Most tourists — and many San Diegans — never see this part of the bay. But the San Diego Unified Port District, the bayfront’s landlord, wants the community to know about the importance of the region’s maritime trade, in hopes of fending off encroachment by non-industrial uses such as hotels, condominiums and sports venues.

Sharon Cloward, executive director of the San Diego Port Tenants Association. (photo/lambertphoto.com)

The Port is a key member of the Working Waterfront Group, formed three years ago to fight a proposal to build a new Chargers stadium at the 10th Avenue Terminal. The group, which also includes the San Diego Port Tenants Association, labor unions, the Environmental Health Coalition, railways and others interested in the health of the bay’s industrial sector, continued meeting after the stadium plan was dropped. These days, the group focuses on education and advocacy regarding maritime issues, and offers tours of the bay’s industrial areas for the public and elected officials.

“The economic core of San Diego today is the working waterfront,” says Dirk Mathiasen, a Port District official who oversees operations of several facilities for the agency, including the 10th Avenue and National City marine terminals. “That is the economic heart of San Diego.”

The Port District points to the following statistics to bolster its defense of maritime operations:

• The direct annual impact of the port’s industrial sector is $4 billion, including the wages paid to 14,950 workers. When “spin-off” impacts such as consumer and business spending generated by the working waterfront are added, the total benefit to the region is $7.6 billion.
  
  
• Workers in the bayfront’s hospitality, recreation and entertainment sectors earn average wages and benefits of $25,595 per year, compared to $62,403 for the industrial and trade sector. (Karl Johnson, spokesman for shipbuilder General Dynamics NASSCO, says the average wage at his company is $22 per hour, a pay scale followed by other local shipyards.)
  
  
• 700,000 tons of concrete, 400,000 tons of sand, hundreds of freight cars’ worth of lumber, more than 300,000 imported cars and trucks and thousands of tons of fruit pass through the Port of San Diego each year. Much of the construction material is destined for new roads and buildings in San Diego County.

Port officials such as Mathiasen say business on the port’s industrial side is booming, with cargo operators looking to expand the amount of goods flowing through the port. One example is the Pasha Group, which handles the arriving vehicles, and expects that number to increase next year. Reorganization and modernization of the facilities at the National City Marine Terminal, where the cars and trucks come in by ship from Japan and Europe, will help bring that expansion, Mathiasen says.

The other main operations in National City are lumber imports and a variety of exports to Hawaii and Asia, from household goods and construction equipment to brand-new Cadillac sedans headed for China.

At the 10th Avenue Marine Terminal, the south end is taken up with facilities for transferring bulk cargo such as sand and concrete from ships to trucks, and the north end is where container ships owned by Dole Food Co. bring in some 50,000 refrigerated containers of bananas from South America, which are then transferred to tractor-trailer rigs to be carried up the West Coast.

Another section of the 10th Avenue terminal is used by military ships to move equipment and other cargo, and for the import of components for windmills that generate electricity at desert “wind farms.”

Harry Belafonte sang about it, but the 10th Avenue Marine Terminal does ‘stack banana till de mornin’ come’ — some 50,000 of them, which are then transported up the West Coast. Day-o! (photo/lambertphoto.com)

The Port District is composed of representatives of the five cities on the bay: San Diego, National City, Chula Vista, Imperial Beach and Coronado.

Of those five cities, only one — National City — has limited public access to its bayfront. Most of the entire three-mile stretch where National City meets the bay is taken up by industrial uses and the 32nd Street Naval Base.

National City Mayor Ron Morrison says he understands the importance of the maritime trade, and has no designs on taking back any segment of the bayfront. But the city is looking for new and better uses for land near the bay, and has already begun the transformation. A 20-acre, 250-slip marina on the Sweetwater river channel will be completed by the end of this year. Morrison has ideas for other complementary uses, including the possible construction of a new sports arena. An earlier proposal to build a stadium for the Chargers on the same site has been scrapped.

Predictably, the sports arena idea has received a cool reception from maritime supporters. But Morrison isn’t backing down so easily. He points to a Port District-owned parcel now used for cold storage and county of San Diego offices as a prime location for such new uses.

The industrial sector, he says, already has “100 percent of the (city’s) tidelands. Now they want the rest. There’s a new (city) council in town, and we’re not doing that anymore.” National City, he says, is “not trying to be greedy. If we were, we’d be yelling for the waterfront. We never have. We say the waterfront is sacred (for industry).”

Lee Wilson, a vice president with Northrop Grumman Continental Maritime, a ship repair facility located beneath the Coronado Bridge, and co-chair of the Working Waterfront Group, says it’s important for people to understand that the land being eyed by Morrison and National City is not vacant but occupied by thriving business and government operations. Further, he says, the parcel was purchased by the Port to make up for the loss of industrial land when the former Campbell Shipyard on the south end of the convention center was targeted for development of a new Hilton hotel, now under construction.

“It’s not an empty lot where you can start building a sports arena tomorrow,” says Wilson. “We believe it was a mitigation of the Campbell Shipyard, therefore by law it’s required to be maritime.”

The maritime industry is sensitive to the needs of communities such as National City and nearby Barrio Logan, says Wilson. As an example, he points to construction work going on at the 28th Street exit of Interstate 5, which will allow trucks to be re-routed to the 10th Avenue Marine Terminal, bypassing residential and commercial streets such as Cesar Chavez Parkway. The project resulted from a collaborative effort of the business community, the Port, the cities of San Diego and National City, Caltrans and Sandag, he says.

John Freeman, a spokesman for Knight & Carver, which repairs yachts and builds windmill blades at its boatyard on the National City bayfront, is sympathetic to National City’s position. He says the sports arena idea is “worth looking into,” and agrees with Morrison that the Port-owned property “could be put to better use. What that is, I don’t think anyone’s sure of yet.” Knight & Carver has its own expansion proposal that will come before the National City City Council this month.

As the maritime industry works to protect its turf, the bay’s hospitality and commercial sectors aren’t sitting by idly. The 1,200-room Hilton is slated to open in the fall of 2008, and a number of other projects are in the planning stages. For example, the Port and the city of Chula Vista are working on plans for a 550-acre development on that city’s bayfront that would be anchored by a hotel and convention center run by Gaylord Hotels. Valued at more than $1 billion, the overall development would include entertainment, retail and two marinas.

Construction is expected to begin this year on conversion of the former San Diego police headquarters next to Seaport Village, which will include restaurants and retail, while the Port District and the Centre City Development Corp. are moving forward with plans to spruce up the North Embarcadero from Seaport Village to Grape Street.

Maritime supporters say hospitality and tourism are important, but the bayfront’s industrial sector provides the muscle for San Diego’s economy, and the high-paying jobs needed to buy a home and raise a family.

A banner fastened to a chain-link fence near the National City Marine Terminal seems to sum up the maritime industry’s mantra: “The Working Waterfront in San Diego — Steel Strong.”