And the cost of Connecticut's unicorn stable rises again
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no whales were immediately available for comment
There are lots of contributing reasons for the cost of this boondoggle soaring, but as usual, corruption is playing a part:
Seabury Maritime, a contractor on the project, was recently fined $10,000 by the Office of State Ethics for undisclosed lobbying before the Connecticut Port Authority. It’s the second such fine imposed on Seabury in two years.
Seabury and the Port Authority are also reportedly the subject of a federal investigation into its 2018 selection of Gateway as manager of the pier on behalf of the Port Authority.
Seabury Capital, which owns Seabury Maritime, was paid $700,000, including a $523,000 “success” fee for choosing Gateway, three months after Henry Juan III of Greenwich, a managing director at Seabury, had resigned from the Port Authority board.
A history of the project can be found here. It includes a discussion of the sweetheart deal that gave a monopoly to Gateway, and a mention of the Jones Act*, which required the building of an entirely new ship in the U.S. to serve this port despite the availability of identical, foreign-built ships around the globe.
One passage that should be, but isn’t, of interest to the Green Weenies worried about carbon-spewing trucks on our highways:
Interestingly (or some would say “inevitably” in the United States, where foreign competition in cabotage services [transporting cargo between two U.S. ports] is restricted), only 2 percent of U.S. freight travels by sea. In the European Union, where cabotage among the member states is permitted, the corresponding figure is 40 percent.15 In Australia, where vessels need not be built domestically to participate in cabotage services, coastal shipping accounts for 15 percent of domestic freight.16Meanwhile, after relaxing its cabotage restrictions in 1994, New Zealand experienced a decrease of approximately 20–25 percent in coastal freight rates over the subsequent six years.17
