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Business View Magazine
at the east end of the Port, where we’re going to be able
to get all these new vehicles in here, starting next year,”
he says.
Mierzwa also recounts how the Port recently helped an-
other one of its major clients: “We worked with our part-
ners at Del Monte, who has a long-term lease here. They
put $12 million into a warehouse that they lease from
the Port of Galveston. They put in more efficient refrigera-
tion equipment; additional storage racks so they could
handle greater volumes of product coming through their
facility; and they enclosed their truck docks where they
load their bananas onto the trucks. They came to us and
said we needed to make some investment on their docks
because the wharf apron, the width of the dock in front
of their facility where the ship is tied up, is only 45 feet
wide. They wanted to bring in a large, shore-based crane
to bring their fruit in containers and they wanted to be
more efficient on how many containers per hour they
could get off their ship, because for them it’s all about
getting the ship into port, and getting it turned around in
28 hours or less, so they can get back down to Guatema-
la, get the next load, and get back up here again all within
a week. The problem was with the weight limitations and
the width of that particular wharf; they couldn’t do what
they wanted to do.”
So the Port of Galveston took part of a $10 million disas-
ter recovery grant it received from the Economic Devel-
opment Administration of the U.S. Department of Com-
merce, to be used for economic development projects,
and went to work. “We took approximately seven million
of that ten million dollars and expanded the wharf an
additional 40 feet, so now it’s 85 feet wide. What that
effectively did for Del Monte, since we made those im-
provements in 2012, was to increase the amount of
cargo moving through that facility by 50 percent - and it
increased the revenue to the Port by 28 percent. These
are the types of things that we do. We really try to work
with our current customers to see what we can do, work-
ing together to help them grow their business.”
Finally, Mierzwa relates how the Port worked with the
Wind Turbine Division of General Electric to effectuate a
$1.5 million railroad project which allowed the company
to move its oversized wind towers through the Port of
Galveston. The problem was that the wind towers were
so big, they couldn’t safely travel on tracks that were too
