Focus on Manatee | Port Manatee’s record cargo activity adding jobs, boosting economy

Port Manatee’s newly achieved exponential gains in cargo activity mean even more than phenomenal increases in the volume of in-demand goods moving through Central and Southwest Florida’s preferred gateway for global trade.

Thriving commerce traversing Port Manatee’s docks also meaningfully translates into provision of a growing number of family-wage jobs and a multibillion-dollar boost to our region’s socioeconomic prosperity.

Last week, Port Manatee announced that an all-time-high 67,675 twenty-foot-equivalent container units (or TEUs) moved through the port in the fiscal half ended March 31 — an increase of nearly 74 percent over the year-earlier six-month period — putting the port well on its way to smashing its 12-month record of 88,466 TEUs accomplished in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2020.

In May 2020, the port released results of a study pegging its annual economic impacts at more than $3.9 billion. The study, conducted by Lancaster, Penn.,-based Martin Associates, the global leader in such undertakings, found Port Manatee to be directly and indirectly generating 27,156 jobs.

Those figures were modeled upon the port’s fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2019, when 57,255 TEUs crossed Port Manatee berths. That fiscal 2019 throughput, while at the time a full-year record for the port, wasn’t even as much as the 67,675 TEUs of containerized cargo activity just reported for the past half of a year. Yes, in the past six months, 18 percent more containers moved through Port Manatee than in the port’s entire 2019 fiscal year.

Because increases in cargo flows drive gains in jobs and overall economic impacts, it’s safe to say Port Manatee is now furnishing considerably more than $4 billion — perhaps more than $5 billion — in contributions to our region’s well-being while supporting more than 30,000 jobs.

Those tens of thousands of good-paying jobs extend far beyond the stevedores who adeptly handle the cargo at port docks, to include truck drivers who haul goods on and off the port, and encompassing a broad range of local service providers, from restaurant and truck stop workers to maritime attorneys and marine architects and engineers.

As our self-sustaining port continues to prudently invest in infrastructure — such as the just-completed North Gate complex expansion, the soon-to-be-finished doubling of the dockside container yard and the near-future Northport berth area extension — a rising number of construction jobs are being created by the port as well.

When we talk about prudent investment, we mean that we are focused upon deploying a portion of port revenues — not taking a penny from local property taxes — to provide infrastructure appropriate for handling thriving levels of cargo activity without unnecessarily overspending on equipment that sits idle much of the time. In fact, Port Manatee’s active mobile harbor cranes typically can handle cargo with just as much or more efficiency than the pricey ship-to-shore gantries that rest underutilized on the property of some other ports.

Particularly in today’s challenging times, it is encouraging to know that Port Manatee is sensibly facilitating the flow of flourishing commerce while producing multibillion-dollar impacts that ripple throughout the region’s economy, supporting the livelihoods of tens of thousands of our neighbors for generations to come.

Carlos Buqueras is executive director of Port Manatee.