The Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District will soon decide whether to commit taxpayer dollars to pursue a business plan for a major container port on Humboldt Bay. A coalition of community-based groups and individuals who live, work and pay taxes in the Humboldt Bay Area urge that any decision regarding industrial port activity around Humboldt Bay not be made hastily. The present harbor development project offers little to be gained and very much to lose.

The Redwood Marine Terminal Feasibility Study (www.humboldtbay.org) outlines two options (A and B) that suggest utilizing the Redwood Dock property as a marine shipping terminal. Option A focuses on developing an infrastructure that would serve cargo and cruise ships, and barges, without requiring access to rail service. Option B, the Harbor District’s preferred alternative, is an industrial terminal development project that would also accommodate international container ships and military vessels. This alternative relies entirely on the speculative resurrection of rail service between Samoa and the southland.

Option B will also involve costly and environmentally damaging deepening of Humboldt Bay from a depth of 26 feet to nearly 50 feet in front of Redwood Dock. Taxpayers and local barge shippers around our bay are still paying off the debt from the entrance and shipping channel deepening project in 1999. This project also resulted in significant erosion problems in adjacent parts of the bay. Deepening the bay is like digging a hole in wet sand — afterward, the bay will need to be continually dredged at a significant cost.

Most likely, with all the failures to adequately demonstrate feasibility, the port development mirage will fall apart long before the ships get here, but only after time, energy and millions of taxpayer dollars have been squandered. Either way, we’re set up to lose if we don’t consider more feasible and better alternatives.

The feasibility study itself says, “The local economic development agencies … advised that the overall profile of companies located in the region is weighted towards small businesses generating limited quantities of international and domestic freight.” Most of these small businesses would not benefit from sea-based shipping, so container traffic would simply pass through on its way to other destinations.

Market demand for a container port on Humboldt Bay is a false premise. After years of fruitless effort on the taxpayers’ dime to attract shippers, Humboldt Bay is not even on their radar. Ports that would be our competitors — Prince Rupert, Coos Bay, Ensenada and Oakland — are far ahead of us, with completed or nearly complete expansion projects. In 2014, the Panama Canal will complete its third lane, allowing more freight to bypass West Coast ports. Meanwhile, West Coast port volumes are flat, or in decline, for 2007, as reported in World Trade Magazine in November 2007.

The traffic passing through a potential port would require a working railroad, yet the North Coast’s railroad was one of the least reliable and most expensive railroads in the country when it operated. The mountainsides of the Eel River Canyon section continue to move and slide, while at the same time the prospects of public funding for the railroad grow more remote. Restoring the Eel River Canyon section alone would cost between $150 and $850 million dollars. Twenty billion dollars of Proposition 1B funds, the best chance for railroad funding, has already been allocated to more viable projects.

Environmental impacts are an extremely important part of feasibility, and these issues have yet to be fully explored in this study. Humboldt County residents value their bay as a recreational and ecological treasure, and simply will not permit any project that gravely compromises Humboldt Bay.

The following groups are in support of these views: Californians for Alternatives to Toxics, Dave Spreen Enterprises Inc., Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County, EPIC, Friends of Small Places, Green Wheels, Healthy Humboldt, Humboldt Baykeeper, Humboldt Bay Stewards, Redwood Family Practice, and the North Group of the Sierra Club’s Redwood Chapter.

(Aaron Antrim is outreach director of Green Wheels.)