Maritime operations to continue at Red HookBy Peter A. Buxbaum, AJOT The working waterfront in Brooklyn, NY, has long had its boosters and detractors. The administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been best known for its advocacy of alternative uses for the Brooklyn piers, from condos to cruise ship terminals to beer breweries. One of the potential victims of this planning is American Stevedoring Inc., the company that operates the Red Hook Container Terminal. The city has been threatening to oppose an extension of ASI’s lease past 2007, a move which has already lost the city billions in potential cargo business and which jeopardizes several hundred waterfront jobs. But that policy may be turning around for two main reasons. First, new leadership which came in earlier this year at the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the city agency which influences port policy, has agreed to take another look at the proposed plans for the piers. Second, earlier in October, nearly two dozen heavy hitting New York politicians put their names on a petition to grant ASI a ten-year lease. The bottom line is that ASI has received a stay of execution. “The container port sustains an important New York City business,” wrote City Council Speaker Christine Quinn in a letter to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey dated October 6. “We call upon the Port Authority to immediately renew the current operator’s port lease at the present site for a term of 10 years.” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and 19 other city, state, and federal politicians also signed the letter. At the EDC, Robert Lieber, a former managing director for Lehman Brothers, took over the helm of the agency in January. Around the same time, the agency’s project manager for Red Hook also left, and was replaced in June by Madelyn Wils, the former president of the Tribeca Film Festival and a community leader from Lower Manhattan. “We are looking for a long-term plan for the Brooklyn waterfront,” said Wils. “I understand there is a lot of history here and I’m just trying to look at this, along with our whole team, with a fresh set of eyes.” The recent history of Red Hook dates back to 1994, when ASI began operating on its decrepit piers. Since then, the company has become one of the largest handlers of imported cocoa beans in the US. It also unloads 150,000 containers per year and employs over 700 full-time waterfront personnel, including workers at the container port, a bulk cargo unloading area, and nearby warehouses. At the same time, ASI has been fighting off plans to turn Red Hook into condominiums, parkland, and most recently, a brewery. The company has received backing from local residents who want to hold onto the vestige of a working waterfront and union jobs it provides, and from elected leaders, who also see the port as a job generator. In the past, both the Bloomberg administration and the Port Authority, which owns the piers, played down the idea that Red Hook would ever amount to a major container terminal. The container port there is much smaller than the region’s other ports on Staten Island and in New Jersey, and it lacks any rail connection or much landside storage space. Costly decisionsThe city also became worried when it began losing cruise ship business to New Jersey, and decided that Red Hook’s deep water facility could supplement the city’s passenger cruise terminal on Manhattan’s West Side. In 2003, the EDC and the Port Authority hired consultants who suggested building 3,600 housing units, three cruise ships berths, and other attractions on the site. These goings on, meanwhile, have cost ASI and the city cargo handling business. As recently as 2005, the German shipping line Hamburg Süd had offered to bring $1.6 billion in trade and 400 waterfront jobs to Red Hook on the condition that it receive an official letter that ASI’s lease would be extended through 2009. When those assurances were not forthcoming, Hamburg Süd withdrew its offer to call on Red Hook. The EDC h