N.Y.-N.J. buys land near Global Terminal

N.Y.-N.J. buys land near Global Terminal    The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey capped a busy week on Friday by announcing it had acquired the 98 acres adjacent the privately owned Global Terminal in Jersey City and Bayonne.
   Under the deal, the port authority takes over ownership of the Global property and, in turn, reaches a 37-year lease agreement for Global to develop adjacent property, formerly used by Northeast Auto Terminal (NEAT), into a single container terminal known as the Global Container Terminal.
   Global, owned by the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, will continue to handle the day-to-day cargo operation, but will have a much larger footprint for its operations.
   The lease agreement calls for revenue sharing on containers handled by Global on the 170-acre combined facility and staged rental payments as the terminal is developed over time.
   In addition, the port authority will provide Global with up to $150 million to develop and construct new container terminal space.
   The port authority also has agreed to develop a rail facility on the adjacent Greenville property that could handle up to 250,000 containers per year, and the New Jersey Turnpike is redesigning the nearby 14A interchange to handle projected port traffic as the Global terminal expands over time.
   The port authority said the Global acquisition and development will relieve the State of New Jersey from a $150 million financial obligation to the federal government to cover the cost of the 50-foot channel-deepening project in the Port Jersey Channel that serves the terminal.
   Global and the former auto terminal are both located on Upper New York Bay, and lie just across the deepwater Port Jersey channel from the former Military Ocean Terminal, Bayonne (MOTBY), where the city government of Bayonne agreed last week to sell the port authority an additional 130 acres.
   The port authority has not said what its plans are for that property.
   The deals give the port authority control of a big swath of land east of, and therefore unaffected by the Bayonne Bridge, with its limited vertical clearance. The port authority’s container terminals in Newark, Elizabeth, and Staten Island all are west of the Bayonne Bridge.
   With 151 feet of “air draft” — the distance between the surface of the water and the bottom of the bridge — at high tide, the Bayonne Bridge is seen as an increasing obstacle as containerships get larger, and as the Panama Canal expansion is completed in 2014.
   The port authority said it is committed to finding a solution to the Bayonne Bridge problem and last week also announced it was fast-tracking a review of environmental issues to help speed modification or replacement of the Bayonne Bridge.
   But development of additional container handling capacity at Global or at the former MOTBY facility could help keep New York competitive with other East Coast ports as the Bayonne Bridge air draft issue is addressed. ' Chris Dupin