Coos Bay ship-to-rail project would boost West Coast capacity

Presenter: The United States is investing in state-of-the-art port facilities in Coos Bay. At the City Club Nov. 21, Andrew Kalloch: 

Andrew Kalloch (City Club): The Pacific Coast Intermodal Port Project (the PCIP project) is a proposed container terminal on the Port of Coos Bay. Container ships would dock and the cargo would be moved straight from ships to the Coos Bay Rail Line, where it would connect here in Eugene to the national rail network.

[00:00:24] We have three folks who are going to be speaking with us today. First is Melissa Cribbins. She’s the executive director of the PCIP project. She served on the Coos County Commission for 10 years and has degrees from Portland State University, Gonzaga Law School, and Coquille High School.

[00:00:39] Melissa Cribbins (PCIP, executive director): The PCIP would be the only inland freight-exclusive gateway on the West Coast. This is truly a ship-to-rail project, so it wouldn’t increase trucking. The benefits are that it reduces emissions due to a shorter ocean voyage and because of the shift to directly to train. And it would create a new gateway for Asian import markets, and that’s who the main conversations are going on with right now. 

[00:01:04] Why Coos Bay? It’s the largest deep draft port between San Francisco and Puget Sound and the only one with both a railroad and available industrial land. It’s only six miles from Coos Bay to open ocean and the port is a natural deep draft port, the dredging that will be required is relatively minimal as far as dredging goes. It has access directly to the Coos Bay Rail Line, and it avoids some of the bottlenecks that are already going on.

[00:01:35] And Coos Bay is traditionally a shipping port. Prior to the spotted owl listing when timber was still in its heyday, Coos Bay handled 350 ship calls per year. Now that number is closer to 55. 

[00:01:49] What would a new container terminal look like? It would provide jobs: 2,600 estimated during construction; 2,500 long-term up and down the length of the project; 7,000 indirect regional jobs. 

[00:02:05] The community benefit would of course be increased tax revenue for these communities, counties and schools, increased shipping capacity and shorter trade routes from Asian ports. 

[00:02:17] The port of Coos Bay has been operational since the 1800s. The port has been modified approximately 10 times through channel deepening. The latest deepening was in 1998 to an entrance depth of 47 feet and a channel depth of 37 feet from River Miles 1 through 15. This project goes about to River Mile 8.

[00:02:40] And historically, the dredge materials have been placed in the estuary to create lands for development.

[00:02:46] We often get questions about why the port is focused on economic development. It’s actually because Oregon law designates the ports as being responsible for economic development. And so ORS 777 sets economic development as a goal of the state as well as of the ports.

[00:03:06] I think it’s important to remember that: This is the history of where ports come from and this is what ports do. They’re supposed to ship things in and out and it makes Oregon a stronger state and it helps with our economy which is something we are all conscious of right now as the legislature’s looking at cuts, unfortunately, for the next biennium.

[00:03:24] So when I speak of the project being a connected action, you know, you have to have the three-legged stool. We have the new container terminal, we have improvements to the railroad, and we have the channel modification.

[00:03:35] The channel modification has been under design since 2007, so it’s at about 95% design. The rest of the project is really at 10% or less. The railroad, of course, already exists, but it needs improvements in order to be able to handle the larger train volume.

[00:03:55] The Request For Proposal (RFP) for design and engineering will go out on the first of January (or right thereabouts) of 2026. They will be open for 45 days and then at that point we will go under contract and hopefully the contracting process will be quick–mid-February–and then the design will start for the terminal and the railroad improvements portion of the project.

[00:04:21] At that point, once they get to at least 45% design and engineering on the terminal as well as the railroad improvements, we can start the NEPA process for the entire project. And the NEPA process will be held as one collective NEPA discussion. 

[00:04:38] And that’s when the federal regulatory agencies can start considering the project as a whole for doing permitting. Until then, we really don’t have any permitting process going on that people can engage in, just because we’re not at that phase yet.

[00:04:56] We would be bringing ships in. They would go either five or eight miles upriver and they can turn around at that point. The design calls for actually two separate turning basins, because this project would also benefit Roseburg Forest Products, which is at River Mile 8. 

[00:05:14] Andrew Kalloch (City Club): Caddy McKeown is a former state legislator, former port commissioner in Coos Bay, and a transportation infrastructure aficionado: 

[00:05:22] Caddy McKeown: Our project is going to be right across the spit from the New Carissa, is where this terminal will be built. Most people know the New Carissa as a landmark.

[00:05:30] The design of the terminal and the rail of course are really closely linked.

[00:05:35] This will be a state-of-the-art terminal. And so that’s why we are actually drawing a lot of interest right now and receiving some grants from the federal government to help us move this project along.

[00:05:46] And Melissa mentioned this will be direct ship-to-rail. We’ll be the only one on the West Coast that’s direct ship-to-rail. So we have some unique qualities.

[00:05:53] It’ll be a two-berth facility–so two ships could come in at a time. It will bring in not the gigantic container ships that you see on the news. Ours will be kind of the mid-level, around 12,000-14,000 (what they call) twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) vessels, and that’s how they measure the containers that sit on a vessel.

[00:06:16] So they’re good-sized, but they’re not the really giant ones that are going to the really big ports.

[00:06:22] The terminal design will follow very green operating principles. When you build something from scratch, you can build in all of the new technology and the things that we want to do that make it energy-efficient. Where old ports have to retrofit, we can do all this brand-new, which is very helpful.

[00:06:38] And we will have to do some rail yard development, of course, so there will be about 7,500 feet of arrival and departure track, 8,300 feet of runaround track, 46,000 feet of storage track and 35,000 feet of working track. 

[00:06:56] There will be wetland impacts that have to be mitigated. And our wonderful DSL (Department of State Lands) director understands all about DSL and wetlands, so she has been involved in these conversations.

[00:07:07] I chaired the Shellfish Task Force in the legislature for 18 months, so I learned a lot about oysters. And the oyster beds in Coos Bay are in the upper bay, and they’re down in the area of South Slough. So it doesn’t impact the upper part of the bay at all where the oyster beds are. And it certainly doesn’t impact the South Slough estuary where the Qualman (Oyster Farms) oyster beds are. So I don’t think the oystermen are going to be particularly nervous about this. 

[00:07:35] We have to make sure there’s significant electrical power, so we’ve already applied to PacifiCorp for a large load. It takes about five years to get that done, so that’s part of what we need to do.

[00:07:46] Of course, stormwater management. There was a lot of shooting out on the North Spit. People go out and sight-in their guns out there all the time. A lot of duck hunting and bird hunting’s gone on out there. So lead removal will be part of what we need to do when we’re working on the terminal site. A lot of sand’s going to get moved and the excess will be used for beneficial use. Some of it will end up on our beaches. 

[00:08:08] When I was on the Port Commission from 2004 to 2013, we had a catastrophic thing happen when the economy was struggling and our short line, CORP–the Central Oregon and Pacific Rail Line–was owned by RailAmerica, RailAmerica was owned by a hedge fund. And our little rail line, it’s 100 years old. My great-grandfather helped build the train station in Coos Bay. I have a photograph of him.

[00:08:36] They were bleeding money because the markets were terrible, and the global economy was in a free fall and RailAmerica needed and Fortress (Investment Group) needed cash. All call went out to their subsidiaries saying, sell off assets.

[00:08:50] And they decided it was a really good idea to take our beautiful little 100-year-old rail line (that was originally built to move coal, believe it or not), they were going to tear up the steel rail and sell it to China for scrap steel for $13 million.

[00:09:04] They embargoed our rail line in one day. Legally, you have to give 120 days’ notice. So it got people a little excited when they did that.

[00:09:14] And so our port commission, with our congressional delegation, our leadership in our state legislature, and our business people and our local electeds all came together, and we went to the Surface Transportation Board and invited them to force RailAmerica to sell us the rail line.

[00:09:32] It was a very bold move. It was a very David-and-Goliath move, and we were not confident that we would be successful, but we were.

[00:09:39] And the Surface Transportation Board awarded us the sale of the line, but we had to come up with $13 million, which was the cost of the scrap steel, to make RailAmerica whole, which we did. So we had a port commission that owned a rail line.

[00:09:55] We hired an operator, got it open and operating, and kept moving cargo for our customers.

[00:10:01] And so there’s a long history of this rail line and how important it is to the port. It was important that we did that and we did it and we were successful. And now it’s time to rebuild it because it’s 110 years old and it needs a lot of work. And to increase traffic on it with state-of-the-art trains, it needs a lot of investment.

[00:10:22] We will replace about 110 miles of track with continuously welded rail. There are 128 water crossings and nine tunnels on this line that need work. That’s part of what the investment will be. We will increase the clearance in the tunnels. We will upgrade sidings because they need to be longer for longer trains. So there’ll be 10,000 foot sidings. We will construct new track from the main line to the North Spit.

[00:10:47] This rail line goes from Coos Bay up the coast to the Siuslaw River, follows the Siuslaw River into West Eugene. This project is bringing cargo in from Asia that is bound for the Upper Midwest, Chicago. So these trains will go up north and up the Gorge.

[00:11:05] The vast majority of this is not going to go through town, it’s going to go north.

[00:11:09] The money that we have in hand right now will allow us to get through the engineering and design work and through the permitting phase until the part where construction will begin. So that money is in hand at this time.

[00:11:23] And we did receive in the last legislative session a $100 million commitment that will be used to actually dig the channel when it comes time to take the channel down eight feet for the eight miles that take us to the terminal and the turning basins.

[00:11:38] We are very interested in making sure that people have current information. The PCIPProject.com newsletter at the port is very good. Their comms director, his name is Matt Friesen, is very good at putting out new information on the newsletter every time we have something to report.

[00:11:58] If you want to sign up for the newsletter, go to the Port’s website and sign up for the newsletter, which will keep you all up to speed on what’s happening and what’s the most current information.

[00:12:06] Once, as Melissa said, the engineering and design starts, NEPA starts, there will be a tremendous amount of community engagement all along the three counties that the rail line runs through. It’s Reedsport. It’s Florence to some degree. It kind of comes by Florence, Mapleton, Reedsport, Lakeside. You know, there are communities along the way and we will be doing outreach to all of them when the time comes.

[00:12:30] Andrew Kalloch: Jeff McGillivray is a 31-year member of UA Local 290, that’s the plumbers and steamfitters, and has served the past 16 years as a business agent for the local. He’s also the secretary-treasurer of the Lane Coos-Curry-Douglas Building Trades and serves on the executive board of Lane County Central Labor Chapter (AFL-CIO). 

[00:12:49] Jeff McGillivray: From day one, when this came up, NorthPoint (Development) came to us, did a project labor agreement to ensure we have the best trained skilled tradesmen on the job. And for me, why this job is so important? We’ve tried to get projects down in the South Coast for years. You know, myself worked in 16 plus years on that, and they haven’t fit environmentally or for whatever reason. And, you know, from governors to all the legislature keep telling us to bring a clean, green project. So we have.

[00:13:22] We have complete bipartisan support on this, in D.C. and here, everywhere. So what it means, you know, not just for our members, but for Coos Bay, I get asked to do a lot of high school talks, going to high schools about careers and stuff, and you go to Coos Bay and there’s not much future there. There’s no industry. There’s decades and decades of job decline there. All their legacy industries are going away. The timber, the fishing, it’s just been really terrible down there.

[00:13:51] There’s jobs there. You can work at McDonald’s and service industry-type stuff, but that’s not a career. And this is opportunities for careers down there. And training, we all have training centers down there in the area ready to go.

[00:14:05] You know, and you look at the 2,600 jobs, and that’s a lot of construction jobs, and I know it’s been said a lot that construction jobs are temporary.

[00:14:16] You know, I’m 32 years into my career as a construction, you know, working as a plumber, and that’s what we do in construction. You work one job to the next, so you string a career together like that, you know. In like six years, I get to retire, so at 58. So it’s kind of a good thing.

[00:14:34] You know, this is going to reach out to small businesses–everything, that whole community. You look at the schools down there, they’re underfunded. The medical system’s underfunded and in fact my daughter, we recreate in Coos Bay a lot, riding ATVs on the dunes. She moved down there after getting through college and working at the hospital. With the cuts there, she just moved last month to Texas to look for better opportunities.

[00:14:57] So that makes a little more personal to me, I guess, too. But it’s a common theme down there. And South Coast has been looking for something, and this, I think this is the right project.

[00:15:09] Charlie Quinn: Charlie Quinn. I longingly looked at that train track and wanted to ride it, and I’ve always been told the tracks would need to be upgraded significantly before passengers were allowed. With this upgrading, is a tourist train to Coos Bay a possibility?

[00:15:26] Caddy McKeown: That’s an awesome question. As the port is an operator right now, they can get a permit to do an excursion, a one-time thing. The port has done that a few times. It is beautiful. If you can get on it, get on it. It is a remarkable opportunity to see a part of the state you don’t see.

[00:15:44] But I’m going to tell you, the reason that passenger rail stopped in the ‘50s is because the highway came in. And when you can drive to Eugene in two hours and ten minutes, and it takes ten hours on the train to get here, people choose to drive.

[00:15:59] It’s also a different level of rail maintenance, if you are providing any type of a passenger service. It’s a different level of inspection. It’s a more frequent inspection, and it’s a way more expensive way to run a rail line. So passenger rail with this project is probably not realistic, because it’s still going to take longer to get here than it does to drive.

[00:16:20] But I think excursions are a great idea. I mean, we’ve already thought: Take a couple of cars, go from Coos Bay to Reedsport to Florence and have one half painted green and yellow and the other half painted black and orange and have concessions on it and make it an evening ride up into the valley, spend the night, come back on a Sunday or bus people back or whatever.

[00:16:42] Those are all ideas that are out there…

[00:16:44] Presenter: As the PCIP project moves into design and engineering, expect to hear a lot more about the Port of Coos Bay and its new state-of-the-art ship-to-rail facility.