Christopher Barnes, vice president and general counsel of NASSCO, says the company imports about 35,000 tons of steel a year for the ships it builds for the Navy and commercial customers. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

At the Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal, longshoremen operate a 300-foot crane to lift a giant windmill rotor off the deck of the Panama-based cargo ship Bright Stream and onto a flatbed truck parked at the wharf. It is a carefully choreographed exercise. The 17-ton rotor has to be securely strapped before it can be hoisted. Next will come the 44-ton windmill nacelles that also must be offloaded.

The windmill parts, made by Mitsubishi Power Systems of Japan and costing between $300,000 and $500,000 each, will be stored at another section of the terminal, then freighted to wind farms in Arizona and other parts of the country.

Christopher Barnes watches from the wharf, no casual observer of the offloading operations. He is vice president and general counsel for National Steel and Shipbuilding Co. (NASSCO), which uses the Tenth Avenue terminal to accept large quantities of materials for the ships it builds nearby for the Navy and commercial customers. This includes 35,000 tons of steel a year and giant ship engines.

“Some of those things are substantial in size,” says Barnes. “A single engine might weigh 180 tons — a few stories tall.”

Barnes is concerned about an initiative headed for the November general election ballot and its potential impact on NASSCO’s operations at the terminal and the many other maritime and industrial activities carried out along the waterfront.

Seventeen-ton windmill rotors are stored at the Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal in San Diego, awaiting shipment to wind farms.

The highly contentious measure, officially called the “Port of San Diego Marine Freight Preservation and Bayfront Redevelopment Initiative” — a label Barnes and others call misleading — seeks to open up the terminal to private development of non-maritime uses such as hotels, restaurants and possibly a sports venue.

“Companies like NASSCO become very concerned because we’re looking at long-term interference with port operations and potentially forcing us to find alternative means to do our business,” says Barnes. “And I’m not sure they exist.”

Michael Bixler, chairman of the Board of Port Commissioners, worries that a November ballot measure will eat up dollars meant for the Port District’s community grants program. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

The initiative is sponsored by a group called San Diego Community Solutions headed by Richard and Nancy Chase. They turned in 60,536 signatures to the Registrar of Voters to get the measure on the November ballot. It requires a minimum of 34,462 valid registered voter signatures to qualify and a certification process is under way using a 3 percent sample of the signatures turned in. Registrar Deborah Seiler says the count will be finished by mid-July.

Should the initiative qualify, the port district would be required to pay the cost of placement, which Seiler says would amount to between $520,000 and $540,000.

“We haven’t set aside a half-million dollars to spend in this fashion,” huffs Michael Bixler, chairman of the board of port commissioners. “That is equivalent to half of our (the port district’s) total grant program being swallowed up — our total community grants program.”

The board of port commissioners, which represent the five cities on the bay — San Diego, National City, Chula Vista, Imperial Beach and Coronado — have taken a position against the measure, claiming it would seriously harm maritime trade. Commissioners also argue that its language is vague and ambiguous.

Nancy Chase says San Diego Community Solutions won’t release specific details about the measure until it qualifies for the ballot.

Ed Plant, president of Harborside Refrigerated Services, which operates a 300,000-square-foot refrigerated storage facility for perishables at the Tenth Avenue terminal, says the mere presence of the Chase initiative has already hurt his business.

“We’re in international business,” says Plant. “We solicit business from all over the world. When foreign countries hear of things like this, they put an X through San Diego. They won’t want to do business with us. It takes about 2-3 years to build good customer relationships and this just stymies that.”

Harborside Refrigerated Services (also called San Diego Refrigerated Services), processes about 1 million tons of perishables a year, primarily from Dole Fresh Fruit Co. It does business with nine different countries, South America, Central America and Australia among them.

Ed Plant, president of Harborside Refrigerated Services, says an initiative proposed for the November ballot already has hurt his business. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

“As the cost of water, labor and land keep increasing in the United States, foreign customers become a better niche for San Diego,” says Plant. “The potential to do more business is huge for everybody here. San Diego is the first port coming into the U.S. As a distribution point, it can do very well. The port is growing 10 to 15 percent every year.”

Fear of commercial encroachment at the Tenth Avenue terminal and at other water-dependent business locations along the bay has led to the creation of an ongoing “Working Waterfront” campaign by the port district, the Port Tenants Association and labor unions. The campaign is intended to educate the public about the industrial and maritime activities and their benefits to the San Diego region — more than 42,000 jobs and over $7.6 billion annually in economic impact.

The Port District points to these statistics:

• An average of 150 million board feet of lumber comes through the port each year — enough to stretch across the country 10 times.
  
  
• Each cruise ship call to San Diego generates an economic impact of about $2 million.
  
  
• One out of every eight new autos in the United States enters the country through the Port of San Diego. (Pasha Automotive Services, which operates on 157 acres at its National City facility, has processed 3 million vehicles since the business was established in 1990 and expects to reach 4 million by the end of 2010.)
  
  
• More than 50,000 containers of bananas will enter the port this year at the Dole Fresh Fruit facility at the Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal.
  
  
• The addition of the National City slips will push the entire bay to more than 7,000 slips.
  
  
• The port supports extensive naval operations. One third of the U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet is home ported in San Diego Bay.
  
  

The port has 600 tenants and sub-tenants in a variety of businesses — hotels, marinas, restaurants, shipyards, manufacturing plants, among others — and is supporting several development initiatives, including the 500-acre Chula Vista Bayfront Master Plan and the North Embarcadero Visionary Plan that covers the Downtown bayfront from Grape Street to Seaport Village.

A draft maritime business plan developed for the board of port commissioners by Virginia-based TEC Inc. says maritime cargo operations generate $1.6 billion annually and support more than 19,000 regional jobs. It says $100 million in state and local taxes are generated from maritime activity at the port.

A progress report on the business plan that was delivered to port commissioners last year projected that the port can attract 350,000 additional automobile imports over the next several years above current levels and 525,000 additional banana deliveries, 200,000 to 750,000 additional tons of imported cement each year, 120,000 additional tons of imported steel combined with lumber, paper and construction materials and 500,000 additional tons of sand.

For the Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal, the consultant recommended removing some of the little-used buildings on the property to make room for a large open storage area to attract imported steel and other “break bulk” cargoes, which are goods that must be loaded individually and not in shipping containers.

Hundreds of new, weather-protected Audis line the concrete at Pasha Automotive Services on Bay Marina Drive in National City. One of the Port District’s largest tenants, Pasha expects that by the end of 2010, it will have processed 4 million vehicles since it first opened in 1990.

The consultant recommended maintaining current operations at the National City Marine Terminal, but allowing for expansion of two tenants, Pasha Automotive Services and Weyerhaeuser lumber. It also recommended realigning the port’s two lumber terminals and auto terminals to consolidate operations, creating a larger space to store cargo and designating part of the space for the staging of military equipment.

NASSCO, one of the port’s largest tenants and the only major ship construction yard on the West Coast, employs 4,700 workers and is under a Navy contract to build 12 T-AKE, or dry cargo-ammunition ships, at its shipyard. Last month it was awarded a $100 million contract by the Navy to purchase materials for construction of the 12th T-AKE ship, which will start construction in the first qarter of 2011 and deliver in 2012. NASSCO has already delivered five of the ships to the Navy.

“We’re a growing business,” says Barnes. “We’re concerned about a misconception that the port is a barren wasteland with nothing going on. It’s a very important port and it’s growing.”

“A lot of developers look at the coastline and see dollar signs,” Barnes adds, referring to the bayfront initiative. “Is NASSCO going to be pushed off the waterfront? This is not just an abstract concern.”

Bixler is suspicious of an idea floated a few years ago to build a deck over the Tenth Avenue terminal, supposedly for a sports venue, which some believe will be part of the November initiative. “We are not taking a recreational preference vote here,” he says. “This is a very serious assault on the industrial base of the Port of San Diego.”