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Business View Magazine
capacity. “We can absorb more business without adding
more infrastructure,” he says. “You don’t have to build
more port. But we do need to have a port that will be
standing here.”
“This modernization effort is important to us,” he contin-
ues, “because we have a facility which is now 54, going
on 55 years old. And there’s quite a corrosion problem
on the piles that support the dock. We invest, annually,
in doing repairs on the worst of the piles – we can afford
to do about a hundred a year to stay on top of the cor-
rosion problem. But it does nothing to give us any struc-
tural integrity enough to survive another earthquake that
might be of a magnitude of the ’64 earthquake. If an-
other earthquake like that happened here, today, I don’t
know what kind of shape this Port would be in, because
of its age. So it’s important for us to replace the docks
with something designed and built to current specifica-
tions that provides us a little better access to deeper wa-
ter and provides our ocean carriers with a more modern
infrastructure to make them more efficient.”
Helping to make its tenants more efficient is a bedrock
principle of the POA. While it is the responsibility of the
ocean lines, themselves, to grow their own businesses,
and pay for their own upgrades and expansions, accord-
ing to Ribuffo, “We need to be a ‘force multiplier.’ We
need to provide a facility that makes these ocean carriers
more competitive, efficient, available, and safe. And that
puts the onus on us to keep the costs of operating here,
