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Business View Magazine
ton of cargo shipped through our Port.”
While shipping is a competitive enterprise, and in
some respects, all the ports along the waterway com-
pete with rail and truck transport, Yarbrough stresses
that, for some customers, water transportation is the
only solution. “If it was not for the waterway, farmers in
southeast Kansas would not be able to get their goods
to market and be competitive in a global market,” he
maintains. “And when it comes to low-margin com-
modities – Arkansas, for instance, has a pretty sub-
stantial sand and gravel business. The margins are so
slim on those types of commodities that without the
waterway, they’re out of business; they can’t afford to
subsist in an environment where all they have is truck
or rail.”
In its ongoing pursuit to better serve its tenants and
their customers, Yarbrough says that the Port has re-
cently completed a $13 million dock renovation proj-
ect. “We applied for and were a recipient of a TIGER
(Transportation Infrastructure Generating Economic
Recovery) grant,” he explains. “It’s a program that
came about right after the current administration
took office, whereby they funnel funds for infrastruc-
ture projects, nationwide. We competed for, and were
awarded a $6.425 million grant. We matched that and
exceeded it with our own capital. We renovated our 45
year-old dock – all new concrete, new fenders on the
face of it; we took down our original, two-hundred ton,
overhead bridge crane and replaced all the compo-
nents; laid 6,000-plus linear feet of new railroad track
on our dock to make us better at transloading from
