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Expanding Oswego Harbor
Going Green
Going Green: Expanding Oswego Harbor
A multi-million dollar expansion of the Oswego Harbor is in the planning stage. The three and a half to four million-dollar expansion is potentially very big.
It is because the Oswego harbor could then take a lot more freight. It could really be a full-scale port and that freight can then be transported throughout the region from Oswego. We’d have a lot more ships coming down through the St. Lawrence and stopping in Oswego instead of going on to Chicago and places like that.
Khris Dodson is with the Great Lakes Research Consortium and teaches environmental studies at SUNY-ESF. He and his students organized the first public meeting on the harbor expansion plans.
So their feedback may affect the plan. It’s a very important thing to create that dialogue between the Port Authority and the public and hopefully we can replicate that kind of participation with other environmental and economic issues throughout the region.
Port of Oswego Director Jonathan Daniels said good questions were asked during the meeting.
What we’re trying to do is make sure we come up with guidelines that work well with the environment, making sure that ballast water management is in place, to make that the environment is not impacted by this type of transportation and at the same time that it’s not something that can impede transportation and the economy as well.
They do have to file several reports and do some analysis before they actually build it. I think the negative environmental effects will be minimal because we already have so much infrastructure here. It’s just really expanding what’s already here.
For example, to reduce congestion, they might schedule offloading of cargo over twenty-four hours instead just in the daytime.
The next step is finding the funding. I’m Terry Ettinger for Going Green.
