The International Marine Terminal

A terminal nobody wanted.

Portland had moved its ferry and cruise business to the Ocean Gateway at the east end of the waterfront. That left the International Marine Terminal at 460 Commercial Street, the old ferry pier, sitting empty at the other end. The City asked the Maine Port Authority whether it would take the terminal on. The Port Authority asked me whether I could run it.

I had never operated a marine terminal. I wrote the lease anyway: a long-term lease-to-own between the Port Authority and the City, approved by the council in April 2009, and on June 1 I came aboard as Director of Operations and Business Development under contract to the Port Authority. The first office was a storage closet at the pier's edge that my brother and I painted overnight.

Build the case, then the ground, then the line.

The case. Before there was a lease there were shipper interviews: who in Maine was moving what, through which port, at what cost. That work became the freight case for the terminal, a Marine Highway designation from the U.S. Department of Transportation for a New England corridor from New York through Boston to Portland, and a first feeder service that put the terminal into the major carriers' systems as a place a container could be routed.

The ground. With the recovery-era grants came the rebuild. I had the grade raised two feet above the hundred-year flood line, two million dollars more in fill, so the terminal would still be there in a bad year. Instead of the rigid steel reefer towers every yard was building, I put an electrical grid in the ground with portable refrigerated plug banks: a reefer yard when there are reefers, a lay-down yard for project cargo when there are not. The utility corridors and the first office building went in before any shipping line had signed.

The line. In 2013 Eimskip, Iceland's shipping line, chose Portland as its U.S. port. We had been building toward that since the first conversations in 2007. From that point the work was recruiting carriers and shippers from zero: a chassis pool so containers could actually leave the port, a first-shipment program that paid the first eight hundred dollars for any Maine business making its first export, rail onto the pier, and one Maine manufacturer at a time converted from a forwarder's price to a direct one. One of them saved more than a million dollars a year.

Maine's only container terminal.

Containers grew from 7,900 to 33,688 TEUs a year. The value of goods moving across the pier grew from eighteen million dollars a year to a hundred and twelve. Wind-turbine cargo came through on the back of a statewide supply-chain initiative. The Port Authority, which Portland's own port director had once called "the Searsport Port Authority," held the lease on Portland's terminal within a year and carried projects at all three of Maine's ports in the years after. The trip to Iceland that the Eimskip work required is where I found the Iceland Ocean Cluster, and the New England Ocean Cluster came home from it.

Fourteen years, and the years before them.

Partners who stayed: the Maine Port Authority, the City of Portland, Eimskip. A long stretch, 2009 to 2013, of building ground and relationships for a tenant that did not exist yet; walking my father through the first office building while it was still under construction, he said the place felt like it was being prepared for something great, and I told him that made one of us. The hard part was not the engineering. It was holding the course through four years when the only evidence was the plan.