All tracks lead to Prince George

They’re practicing their southern drawls in Prince George as the plans continue to turn the interior BC city into the Huntsville of the North. At least that seems to be the ideas being bounced around over the last few weeks.

The potential of Prince Rupert’s Container Port has them thinking big in Prince George and using Huntsville as the template for success could turn the city into a major transportation hub.

The inland port of Huntsville, Alabama has turned around that city’s economy quite a bit over the years, accounting for jobs for over 7,500 employees and revenues of over 700 million dollars a year. With statistics like that it’s no wonder they’re anxious to get their infrastructure in place quickly to make sure that they’re first in line to benefit from the boom in commerce soon to arrive on the shores of the North Coast.

The Daily News filled in some of the blanks over the plan with a front page story on Prince George’s hopes in Wednesday’s edition.

PG HOPES IT’S ON TRACK FOR MASSIVE PORT-RELATED YARD
Report suggests Prince George has huge potential
By James Vassallo
The Daily News
Wednesday, November 9, 2006
Pages one and three

Call it the Huntsville, Alabama of the North.

According to a new report, Prince George has a massive opportunity to build an intermodal container facility that would capitalize on backhaul to Prince Rupert’s container port. The facility would employ air, truck and rail transport in the same vein as Huntsville’s inland port – a once faded southern belle that now employs more than 7,500 people at the facility and generates $700 million plus a year.

“There’s a major economic opportunity … for two reasons,” said Kathy Scouten, Initiatives Prince George. “First, there’s a trade imbalance meaning there’s more trade volumes coming in to West Coast ports than going out and there’s a need to find stuff to put in the containers on their way back to Asia.

“The second reason is that West Coast capacity constraints have created a real opportunity through Prince Rupert.”

A major competitive advantage for any port is to find ways to take advantage of backhaul, and that requires an intermodal facility in Northern B. C., she said.

For Prince George, part of their product is already close at hand as major forestry producers would be able to send their goods overseas on the cheap. The Northern B. C. Container Terminal Opportunity Study notes 790,068 mfbm (thousand board feet) of lumber could be sent to Japan, 108,428 mfbm of lumber could go to other East Asian countries, 262,107 tonnes of pulp could enter Japanese markets and another 589,784 tonnes could go to China. This would provide a capacity of 60,000 container loads of B. C. forest products alone, or three times the number of containers usually required for an intermodal facility to be economically viable.

“This study clearly identifies the competitive advantage of establishing an intermodal cargo centre in Prince George, and what opportunities that would bring for Northern British Columbia,” said Colin Kinsley, Prince George Mayor. “We often thought what role we will play with increased traffic that will come to North America through Prince Rupert.”

“There are opportunities… and the timing couldn’t be better in my view with the situation existing with the mountain pine beetle epidemic. There will be new products that will find a new home in Asia.”

The report highlights a number of strategic advantages for an intermodal facility in Northern B. C.- others have been proposed for Grande Prairie and Edmonton – including the fact that the city is located within a half day drive of forest product producers that supply enough cargo to fill minimum operating requirements; it is centrally located to support construction of the Kitimat-Alberta pipeline, which will require the importation of significant quantities of equipment and material; Prince George has the closest major rail yard to the new Prince Rupert container terminal; and the capacity to handle transpacific shipments.

The study found that the development of a rail and road intermodal facility in Prince George would support economic development in the region not only by providing incremental transportation related jobs, but also by ensuring that manufacturing businesses had access to containers, and had a cost-competitive, high service transportation option for exports to Asia and other international markets. Employment estimates indicate that the proposed facility could support up to 750 jobs in the region, which would represent 358 full-time equivalent positions. Around 75 to 100 new jobs would be created within the Prince George area specifically, with as many as 340 new jobs spread through the region.

According to the report, the economic impact would generate $44.2 million in direct, indirect and induced wages, $35 million in GDP and $84 million in output.