Longshoremen ask Army to investigate terminal redevelopment

Longshoremen ask Army to investigate terminal redevelopment    A group of longshoremen have asked the Army to investigate plans to redevelop the former Military Ocean Terminal in Bayonne, N.J.
   The longshoremen, members of Local 1588 of the International Longshoremen’s Association, say they believe that Bayonne Local Redevelopment Authority (BLRA) has violated the agreement that allowed the city to obtain the property from the federal government for free.
   They say the city is failing to carry out the plan for developing the property into a container terminal, a plan they say could create hundreds of jobs for their members.
   In a letter to Keith Eastin, assistant secretary of the Army, longshoremen Angelo Mack and Robert Dickey ask that the military insist the Bayonne authority “suspend all redevelopment activity” at the former base until an investigation is conducted, and until redevelopment is put back on the course outlined when the city obtained the marine terminal at no cost from the federal government.
   Earlier this year, then-administrators of ILA Local 1588 wrote letters raising similar concerns about development of the former army based with New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine and Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J.
   Mack and Dickey said Bayonne’s plans for the peninsula on which the Army base once stood are a far cry from the plans laid out when the Army gave the base to the city. In the letter the longshoremen say they became particularly “alarmed when we discovered that several deeds to parcels of property adjacent to the Maritime District (future home of the planned container port) contained startling covenants in which the BLRA agrees never to build a container port anywhere on MOTBY.”
   They call the former base the “premiere maritime asset in New York Harbor and one of the world’s most valuable pieces of maritime property.”
   They note that unlike other sites in the port, ships do not have to contend with air draft restrictions caused by the Bayonne Bridge, which restricts the height of ships calling at the main containers terminals in Staten Island, Newark and Elizabeth. That makes it not only “ideally suited to accommodate the new 10,000-TEU container ships but also makes it essential if the Port of New York and New Jersey is to handle the expected doubling of cargo by 2015.”