The U.S. maritime industry is awakening from decades of slumber. Midsized ports and cohesive maritime regions—areas like Jacksonville—will lead the way.
Despite bad news from America’s naval shipbuilding programs, the U.S. maritime industry is awakening from decades of slumber. With America’s big legacy shipyard sites in Virginia, California and elsewhere unable to easily expand, the U.S. Government has an obligation to identify America’s next centers of maritime industrial growth. A national competition is in order, where the winners get decades of guaranteed waterfront development and thousands of steady jobs.
As a start, the U.S. government—the U.S. Maritime Administration, the U.S. Navy, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Maritime Commission—can, if pushed by an engaged White House, move quickly to identify and survey a handful of potential “maritime opportunity zones,” where modern maritime industries can, with a little government help, break new ground.
In Florida, the Jacksonville region offers an ideal template for aggressive maritime development. As a port, Jacksonville has long been overshadowed by larger, more strategically located harbors on America’s Atlantic coast. But Jacksonville’s urban waterfront hasn’t been subjected to overwhelming residential growth, nor has the local economy moved away from the basic “blocking and tackling” of military support work. The region is decidedly pro-business, and there’s plenty of space for the maritime industry to expand along the St. Johns River.
In total, the St. Johns River basin offers a solid, modestly-sized blend of government and commercial customers, a functional shipbuilding industry, and a relatively untapped workforce, all within an easy cruise to the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
The region is already committed to the maritime. It has fought hard to keep their harbor and maritime-oriented military bases active, full and busy. Jacksonville’s port, or JAXPORT, isn’t known as a national leader in vessel or cargo throughput, but it is one of only 17 U.
