UIPA hopes Oakland pact will help supply chain

Brice Wallace 

Hoping to repeat success of an initiative with the Port of Long Beach, the Utah Inland Port Authority (UIPA) is working to forge a similar agreement with the Port of Oakland in hopes of untangling the knots in supply chains.

At a recent port authority board meeting, Jack Hedge, executive director of UIPA, said an agreement among the authority, the Port of Oakland and Union Pacific Railroad would help smooth and quicken the movement of export and imports. The aim would be “to disperse the trade lanes a bit so that not everything is trying to come through Southern California.”

Without citing statistics, Hedge said an agreement announced in late October among the Port of Long Beach, the authority and the railroad “will provide immediate relief because bringing this direct rail service into Utah is a way to unclog the ports, get goods and products that are destined for Utah out of the ports quicker, sooner, faster, and get them here by rail, as opposed to the traditional method and the method that’s causing all the congestion, quite frankly, of transloading cargo in Southern California and then trucking it into this market.”

The Long Beach initiative calls for optimizing the existing on- and near-dock rail system there to shrink dwell times and improve the speed and consistency of rail deliveries to and from Utah through direct, regularly scheduled rail service connecting Long Beach to Salt Lake City.

Because of congestion at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, certain carriers are considering Oakland as an alternative to get products into the U.S., Hedge said.

“It would take some cargo that is designed for here that currently is going through Los Angeles/Long Beach and getting caught and getting in that congestion, and bring it in through a different route than it currently comes,” Hedge said. “And that, of course, would have major benefits for our local economy as well as continue to build on that rail network and the more efficient and sustainable movement of the cargo into this cargoshed that we need to sustain our economy.”

Hedge said that about 80 percent of cargo moving through and to Utah is done by truck and that using 100 intermodal rail cars equates to taking 300 trucks off highways, with benefits to both shipping and air quality.

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have experienced myriad problems in recent months, including shortages of dock workers and truck drivers. Early this month, a record 111 container ships were waiting to dock and unload there, according to data from the Marine Exchange. The previous record was 108 on Oct. 21. In contrast, before the COVID-19 pandemic, the record was 17.

Hedge said the Long Beach agreement has garnered national and international news media attention.

“Utah is on the map, nationally and internationally, for being part of the solution, part of fixing the problems that we’re having here in the supply chain today, and we’re very proud of that, very happy about that,” he said.

Another effort to fix those problems is the creation of an export-import alliance, which the authority is working on along with World Trade Center Utah and the Salt Lake Chamber. The alliance would “conglomerate” the logistics and shipping needs of smaller exporters and importers in the state, he said.

“By gaining that weight in the market, it gives them leverage and capacity with the carriers that will give us a little more standardized service, a little more accountability and a forward look into what those goods movements look like coming into the future, and give them a little better ability to plan and invest in that goods movement,” he said.

“It will give them real benefits that simply they don’t have today. They just aren’t big enough alone to get that kind of capacity, get that kind of weight and service offerings. This will give them that.”

The port agreements and the alliance, he said, demonstrate UIPA’s role “as a problem-solver, particularly given some of the logistics issues that the U.S. economy is facing right now.”