Will Jasper port plan be Mark Sanford’s top achievement?

By MIKE FITTS - Associate Editor

THE GOVERNOR’S chief of staff, Tom Davis, thinks the deal made with Georgia to build a port in Jasper County is an enormous, underappreciated achievement.

How big is the economic payout likely to be? “Much, much bigger than BMW in the Upstate,” Mr. Davis said.

That frame of reference helps in understanding the passion over issues involving the ports, as reflected in the op-ed piece on the opposite page.

Mr. Davis has served a stint on the state Ports Authority and, as chief of staff, has been the lead negotiator with Georgia on behalf of Mark Sanford. So this deal is personal for him, of course. But he argues that folks in Columbia, especially at this newspaper, have failed to appreciate the economic powerhouse being constructed on the governor’s watch.

To buttress that, he starts with where we were on the Jasper port just two years ago: going nowhere, except to court. The S.C. Ports Authority was suing Jasper County to block the county’s effort to develop the port, asserting that only the agency had the right to do such a thing; Jasper had filed a countersuit. Georgia was suing Jasper County too. The S.C. Ports Authority also was locked in a legal battle with Georgia over development rights, and that one, Mr. Davis says, would have had to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Even if South Carolina had won the right to develop, he says, there still would be a fight over the environmental permits — with Georgia making it as tough as possible, in the interest of protecting the growing Port of Savannah.

It certainly was a mess, with little hope of improvement — or of improving our port capacity. Charleston, with help from its powerful legislative delegation, had finally blocked the planned big new terminal on Daniel Island, and South Carolina was looking ahead to a lack of growing space for its ports. The smaller plan for the old Charleston Navy base merely will keep pace with the huge increase in imports; it’s not the driver of growth that’s possible at Jasper’s wide-open site on the Savannah River.

States from North Carolina to Florida have been investing heavily in ports, with an eye to bigger cargo ships being able to move through the Panama Canal in 2012. The lack of a long-term answer in South Carolina would at some point begin affecting the interest shown by major shipping companies.

To break the logjam, Gov. Sanford and Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue forged a deal to have the two states develop the Jasper site in a joint effort, under a still-to-be-settled final structure.

What persuaded Georgia to stop the fight? Mr. Davis said a key argument went like this: Join us and share in Jasper’s success, or after a drawn-out legal fight, get nothing.

I’m sure that was a big part of it, but it must have helped that the two governors are free-market conservatives and political mavericks.

Since the two governors agreed last year, the process is rolling along, Mr. Davis says. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers controls the site, because it has been dumping river dredge there. Corps leadership now says it will expedite the process of getting the construction approved.

An interim bi-state panel met for the first time this week, and it is preparing to buy the site from Georgia’s Department of Transportation. Meanwhile, the process for the two legislatures to approve the plans is just starting. That will decide the shape of the entity that will govern the port — and how to pay for the hundreds of millions of dollars to build it.

There’s no disputing that important business leaders see the port plan as key to South Carolina’s economy. In a guest column last April, Ed Sellers of BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina and Darla Moore of the Palmetto Institute called the port plan “vitally important” and “an opportunity much too valuable to let slip away.”

I don’t dispute any of that. The current trade balance is here to stay: Imports will be an increasing part of the South Carolina economy — and exports too, we hope. The Jasper port site, well-connected by road and rail and close to the ocean, is a huge economic asset that South Carolina has not acted upon.

Does the port deal, however, outweigh Mark Sanford’s shortcomings as governor? It’s hard to give him that much credit.

One notable trait about all this negotiation: Gov. Sanford and his chief of staff were able to do this without dealing with the Legislature — just a sometimes-skeptical Ports Authority.

Dealing with the Legislature, of course, is where Mark Sanford’s efforts most often break down. (The governor argues that his efforts to talk up tax cuts have had an effect in the Legislature.) When he’s trying to restructure our sclerotic government, that breakdown is a bad thing. When he’s trying to launch his private school tax credit experiment, that’s a good thing.

Gov. Sanford’s maverick nature led him to an important success for South Carolina on the Jasper port, a project that now looks like it will come to fruition. But that same maverick streak continues to frustrate him at the State House.

Reach Mr. Fitts at mfitts@thestate.com.