Minneapolis leaders are eager to do away with the city's rusting port in north Minneapolis, and a fish is giving them an excuse to move quickly.
City officials met Tuesday to discuss a plan that would cease all barging operations at the city's 50-year-old terminal on the Mississippi River by April 2013, reducing lock and dam activity downstream that provides a path for Asian carp into greater Minnesota. The plan, the most favored out of three presented to a City Council panel Tuesday, could cost between $2.1 million and $2.8 million and eliminate a dozen jobs.
Mayor R.T. Rybak is leading the charge to get rid of the port, noting that it's one of the nation's best urban redevelopment opportunities along the Mississippi riverfront. He thinks the 48-acre site, which now contains shipping equipment and piles of raw materials, should instead be "creating job potential and housing potential and recreation potential" as north Minneapolis' "front door on the Mississippi."
"Anybody who says we're moving too fast on this -- I think we're about a decade too slow," Rybak told the council's development committee. "The one raw material we have a lot of that should be stored on this site is studies of the upper river. We've studied this thing to death."
Companies bring a variety of materials, including fertilizer, coal, twine and asphalt, to the port in barges; about 135 of them traveled through the lock in 2011. The material is stored there and shipped out later by truck. A handful of other companies with similar facilities nearby also use the lock, including Aggregate Industries and Northern Metals.
For Asian carp watchers, the primary concern is the Upper St. Anthony Falls lock and dam. The fewer vessels that travel through it, the less chance the fish have to swim upstream.
Members of Minnesota's congressional delegation have introduced legislation that would give the Army Corps of Engineers, which owns and operates the lock and dam, the authority to close it. But the legislation has not moved in Congress.
By owning a port that accepts barges, Council Member Cam Gordon said, "we are only encouraging [the locks and dams] to stay open longer. We don't control the locks and dams, but I think that we can make a difference and this is one step moving in that direction."