What will the Utah Inland Port look like?
The short answer is that nobody knows, not even the chairman of the Utah Inland Port Authority board.
Speaking recently at a Salt Lake Rotary luncheon, Derek Miller acknowledged that lots of study still needs to take place to develop several hundred acres in Salt Lake City’s Northwest Quadrant into a site that will “maximize the economic impact and minimize the environmental impact.”
In broad terms, many see the area to someday be a hub for manufacturing, warehousing, logistics and distribution of goods. Miller said it will feature all of the activities that take place at a seaport — including customs work and the movement of containers to trucks or rail — with the exception of unloading the goods from ships.
“I get asked all the time, ‘What’s the best model for an inland port that we would want to build in Utah?’ And I say, ‘It hasn’t been built. There’s no model for it,’” Miller said, “because we have the opportunity to learn from everyone else — what did they do well, what mistakes did they make that we should avoid?”
During site visits to existing ports, an exploratory committee saw everything from a sophisticated facility in South Carolina that contained the North American manufacturing plant for BMW, to a Georgia site that featured a single-story building and the movement of containers from truck to rail.
“The point I’m trying to make is, there’s a broad spectrum of what an inland port might look like,” Miller said.
Whether or not it ultimately becomes a commerce center, Utah’s port has so far been a center of controversy. Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski has sued because of what she considers the board’s usurpation of land-use and tax authority from the city, and protestors have raised issues focused on possible environmental impacts that the port could have on air quality and the Great Salt Lake.
“It’s a one-step-at-a-time kind of project,” Miller said. “And that’s been part of the frustration, I think, from many quarters is there is a lot that we don’t know yet. So often, in the absence of fact, we project our fear. But I can tell you my approach to it is — and always has been for the last three years — as long as we get a green light and it makes sense, we’ll take the next step.”
Port proponents have hailed the project as a way to advance Utah from “Crossroads of the West” to “Crossroads of the World.” Miller said that of the 10,000 developable acres in the Northwest Quadrant, a few hundred acres would be the site of “a transfer facility that then drives and guides development of the rest of those thousands of acres so that it doesn’t just fill up with warehouses over the next several decades, so that we actually have something that will bring jobs to our community.”
Miller said manufacturing is a key element to understanding the opportunity that the port presents “because what I think we’re really trying to accomplish is to bring manufacturing — manufacturing companies and manufacturing jobs — to the Northwest Quadrant. That is the goal, as I see it.”
With Utah already a crossroads for interstate highways and railroads and with the redevelopment project at the Salt Lake City International Airport, the inland port would be a way “to connect those three assets to maximize the potential of that infrastructure that we already have,” Miller said.
Utah already is an “internationally engaged state and an internationally connected state,” Miller said, citing statistics showing that Utah is the only state to double exports over the past 10 years and have positive export growth in that period; is the fourth-fastest-growing export economy in the U.S.; has 3,544 companies that export, of which 85 percent are small businesses; and has nearly one in four jobs supported by international trade.
“The opportunity that exists and the authority that the board that I share is to use tax increment to guide the development,” he said. “In a nutshell, that’s the charge we’ve been given by the legislation that was passed: to guide the development in this area in, I think, a way that we can maximize the economic impact and minimize the environmental impact.”
Currently, a two-part study is taking place that will guide the port’s future. One is a business plan and the other an environmental impact study. “I certainly agree with the principle,” Miller said, “that we ought not to do anything that is going to damage the environment.”