Last month, Portland celebrated the opening of a deepwater pier that finally allows large cruise ships to tie up at its three-and-a-half-year old, $27 million passenger terminal on the eastern waterfront. At the ribbon-cutting, the political class turned out in force to bask in the camera lamps, including Gov. Paul LePage, city mayor Nicholas Mavodones, and much of the city council.
“I am happy to say we have a place that can dock many of the largest ships in the world,” Mavodones said, with the 91,000-ton cruise ship Celebrity Summit forming a backdrop behind him. “The Portland waterfront is an economic engine for the entire state. As Portland succeeds, so does the region.”
The opening of the pier is certainly good news for taxpayers in Maine’s largest city, who shelled out over a quarter million dollars last year to meet Ocean Gateway’s bond payment and net operating losses in the wake of the loss of its primary shallow-draft tenant, The Cat ferry service to Nova Scotia. With the completion of the $6 million pier earlier this year—funded by a transportation bond approved by Maine voters—large cruise ships finally started tying up at the facility. Previously, its soaring glass terminal hall had been used primarily for weddings and cocktail receptions.
It also literally takes the pressure off the adjacent Maine State Pier, an 89-year old city-owned structure whose alleged deterioration formed the background for one of Portland’s more notorious scandals.
A few years ago, prominent city politicians alleged that age and the stresses of hosting 100,000-ton cruise ships would soon cause the State Pier deck to fall into the sea, when in fact experts had told them the facility was sound. City councilors approved a plan to fix this non-existent problem by leasing much of the pier to politically connected private developers for use as a hotel and office complex. The project fell apart in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, prompting city officials to finally focus on finding the funds to complete Ocean Gateway.
This season, the city expects 32 large cruise ships carrying 50,500 passengers to tie up at the pier, along with 21 visits by the small, shallow-draft vessels of the Blount Small Ship Adventures and American Cruise Lines fleets, which use The Cat’s former berth and will carry a total of 2300 additional passengers.
Unfortunately, that’s not yet sufficient to put the terminal in the black. The additional cruise ship visits are expected to boost operational revenue to $521,000, according to city figures. But staffing, maintenance, utility, marketing, and other operational expenses come to over $300,000, and the city’s annual debt service payment adds another $280,000. The facility is coming close to balancing its books, but will need to attract more large ships—or a new international ferry—to close the remaining gap.
That’s not expected to be a problem in the medium-term, according to city spokesperson Nicole Clegg. “Now that the pier is open and operational, we can market both terminals,” she says, adding that cruise lines typically plan schedules two years in advance, so the real benefits are still in the pipeline. “Currently, many ships bypass Portland if they have to [anchor in the harbor and] tender. With double the berthing capacity, our plan is to capture as many ships as possible that are sailing north past Portland to Bar Harbor or Nova Scotia.” (Bar Harbor currently sees almost twice as many cruise ship visits as Portland.)
Whether the city should have built Ocean Gateway in the first place is still an open question. As regular readers know, the decision to build the facility more than a decade ago was made in the absence of sound data on the economic benefits. When a proper survey was finally commissioned in 2009, it revealed direct per-passenger benefits to the area to be approximately half than former city port director Jeff Monroe and other city officials had claimed. While overall economic benefits to southern Maine were thought to exceed $6 million in 2008, many of those benefits accrued to Freeport, Kennebunkport, and other communities outside the city limits. But if Portland succeeds in attracting large numbers of additional ships, perhaps its residents will finally see a return on their investments.
Colin Woodard’s new book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, was released last month by Viking Press.