By Paul Scott Abbott, AJOT Mark Montgomery, president and chief executive officer of Ports America Chesapeake, has reason to be proud of the public-private partnership of his firm with the Maryland Port Administration for the operation of the Port of Baltimore’s Seagirt Marine Terminal. In an exclusive interview with the American Journal of Transportation, Montgomery shares how he believes the proverbial stars have aligned in bringing about a partnership for efficiently bringing increased container volumes through Baltimore, propitiously timed with Panama Canal expansion and the public-private National Gateway rail infrastructure project. First, Mark, let me congratulate you on your recent receipt of the 2012 William Donald Schaefer Industrialist of the Year Award from the Baltimore Museum of Industry. The award recognizes visionary business leaders distinguished by their innovative approaches, and the public-private partnership of Ports America Chesapeake with the Maryland Port Administration for operation of the Seagirt Marine Terminal certainly is innovative. Can you please share a bit about how this P3 came about and why it is proving successful?Ports America or its predecessor companies have been in Baltimore since 1921, so it’s been a port that we’ve been committed to, and we’ve been operating Seagirt since it opened [in 1990]. When Seagirt was built, three berths were completed, and Berth 4 needed to be finished to allow for deep water up to the berth and allow for a 50-foot berth, and the state did not have the funding at the time. So the port went out on an RFQ [request for qualifications] to seek interested parties. Obviously, as the incumbent, Ports America got involved, and all of that started happening in 2009. It gave an opportunity for us to invest in the port, and we’ve been committed here for many years and believe in the economic model that has been in the Port of Baltimore. If you take Baltimore, Washington and Northern Virginia, it is the third-largest consumer market in the country, so Ports America has been committed to this region. We’re a big employer. We provide 70 percent of the ILA [International Longshoremen’s Association] workforce in the port to both ro/ro [roll-on/roll-off] customers and container customers. Baltimore is a niche port, but we see great opportunity with the 50-foot draft that the [Chesapeake] Bay has. We’re water-cleared to get here and have no bridge restrictions. And, with the Panama Canal project happening, it was a great opportunity for us to invest in the facility and to continue to commit to the state of Maryland. We see it as a good economic facility for Ports America as well. The stars were definitely aligned for the bid. The Panama Canal offers this opportunity for big-ship economics to work for the East Coast. We became the successful bidder at the end of ’09 and then started operations in January 2010. And so what is it that makes this P3 so successful?I think the big, significant things that make the P3 super-successful are, one, that you have a government and a private industry joining together for the betterment of the facility, and then, obviously, having the project be the first tax-exempt-bond-financed facility in the port sector in the United States. That’s all fantastic stuff, running through a Moody’s rating and having the ability to sell a tax-exempt vehicle on the market and that being a success as well. The financing of the deal and the innovation that was there is another significant thing – just making the deal such a success for the state of Maryland and for Ports America. And then it is really the opportunity to make Seagirt continue to be a world-class facility that it has been for 20 years, but to take the next step and get it into big-ship economics. To follow up, how important is the Panama Canal expansion in all of this?The way that Ports America looked at this is that we obviously are a couple years ahead of the Panama Canal expansion finishing. The wharf is finished.