I think Mr. Moore puts forward an awkward straw man argument against port merger that doesn't really make sense when you play it out.

There would be no bar against directly elected port commissioners in a merged port authority. Establishing a Puget Sound-wide port authority would give the public ports more market power to better resist the race to the bottom that the current market encourages, where terminal operators and shipping lines play public port authorities off each other for bigger and bigger discounts and subsidies.

A merged authority would also end the practice of local port authorities using taxpayer dollars to compete with each other (benefiting no one but the terminal operators that Mr. Moore represents) and allow for the better allocation of scarce local resources in building infrastructure. In that sense, we would see much better public accountability of our public port authorities.

And port merger would be extremely good for jobs creation, another argument Mr. Moore seems to dangle as a reason for separate, weak port authorities in Washington State. A good real world example of this the Virginia Ports Authority: when the three separate ports in Virginia merged into a single state authority in the 1970s, jobs and cargo surged at all three ports. When the three separate ports in Metro Vancouver merged just a few years ago, an often stated rationale by British Columbians was to better compete with the ports of Seattle and Tacoma and bring more jobs to Vancouver.

A merged public port authority in my opinion would actually increase public involvement and public accountability with respect to our ports in creating an government authority better able to withstand the bureaucratic capture by industry that many agencies suffer.

Mr. Moore and I have discussed this in the past. Government consolidation may not always work in all circumstances, but I believe there is a very good case to be made - in contrast to Moore's assertions- with respect to creating port authorities that better serve the public. I have written down my thoughts previously in the Seattle Times:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2012647409_guest18creighton.html

The question of port merger is not something we should just dismiss with straw man arguments. At the very least, we should be supportive of attempts by the Washington State Legislature to study the idea, its advantages and disadvantages. Good public policy is not made by keeping our heads in the sand.

John Creighton
Seattle Port Commissioner

In and of itself a five person commission,part time, understaffed and underfunded where a few stand for election every few years is no guarantee of anything, except nepotistic arrangements with the over-funded port executive which is in far to close relationship with the major terminal operator SS A Marine http://www.ssamarine.com/

Looking at John Creighton's thoughts, above: Possibly even a state Port Commission is in order - poor Gray's Harbor and Hoquiam don't even seem to be in the running for the coal port!

I got to know just a bit about all this during the election that
put Pat Davis in her last term as commissioner, about six years
ago, as adviser to one candidate who had to drop out because
Citycorp suddenly prohibited its successful executives from
doing public service of that kind. By the time I switched my capacity to Jack Jolley, who went on to lose to Pat Davis by a point, I had attended a lot of public discussions, from one district to the other, got to know and like Dow Constantine in the process, got deep into the good working heart of the local democratic party, which so many candidates take for granted, Labor Temple and all, attended a lot of Commission meetings at Port H.Q. Tim Eyeman got Brian Sontag to investigate the Ports finances, there seemed to be a 100 million dollar problem I recall. I went to a lot of meetings at Port Headquarters and noticed that the reporters of the then two city papers left at five sharp and that their reporting consisted of taking down the executive report - the formible Mic Dinsmore was still in charge - verbatim, as which they appeared, boiled down the next day. The only paper that was giving the Port Commission and the Port a hard time was The Stranger. The Sontag report had as its consequence the resignation of Mic Dinsmore, Pat Davis, who had initially won election a generation before, as a reformer, did not stand for re-election, and with the public in yet another reform-minded mood, the best commissioner, Alec Fisken, was voted out of office in exchange for Bill Bryant, whom I took one look at at a meeting where both he and Alec were in a forum, and I had this ghastly deja vue of the congressman from Staten Island who also represented me in lower Manhattan in the late 70s. Abscam, here we come! That is, I have some experience of city politics and also of the democratic machine and its forever Manhattan downtown reform wing, and with the work entailed in my book WRITE SOME NUMB'S, BITCH had made interesting acquaintance with the seedy and the business side of this fair city. I got sufficiently interested in both the Ports of Tacoma and Seattle to venture a long story on their competition, even interviewed the indeed very formidable Mic Dinsmore. I couldn't find a taker for my story, not even with all those wonderful photos to lighten and illustrate. I did a fine interview with Mr. Dinsmore, I have interviewed Nobel Prize winners, they are the final editors of the text, no one hereabouts was interested in the Dinsmore interview. Looking at the commission as it is now constituted, I have the sense that both Bill Bryant and Gael Tarleton are anything but the reformers as which they were elected. I miss both Alec Fisken and Lloyd Hara. I also got to know and much like Bob Edwards, the Republican on the commission who was defeated by Tarelton. Actually, I've liked a lot of Republicans of a certain kind for a long time. Not many of them running for president right now. I also interviewed the then head of SSA Marine, happened to have a couple of stevedores for friends, but the upshot for me was to get yet another deep look into the prevailing nepotism which can also be extremely fine grained.

The port commissioners while they may be well intentioned are a poor choice for running such a large operation. First, why in the heck does the port have taxing authority over all of us? Why should the tax payers be subsidizing the port operations? Most commissioners are pawns of the port it self. They have no way to judge the value/quality of the information given to them. Yet they are paid almost nothing for the job and we are surprised that nothing seems to change?

Clearly if you were looking at the Puget Sound Region, you'd merge Tacoma & Seattle & Everett & Bremerton ports into one entity so that they wouldn't bid against one another for business. But Seattle has alienated all the others over the years so they wouldn't want to. Plus if we are to have an elected body run the port we'd have to have different voting rules so that we could run initiatives, recalls and elections unlike the Sound Transit board. But fixing this is more than hopeless it's impossible. It may be that the only way is for the state to run the ports instead of the cities. That way when we compete with California we could present unified offers to shipping companies. Of course we'd be shipping coal out of Bellingham by now which I'm currently opposed to.

I too miss Alec Fisken but he was a lone wolf on the commission.

I gather that Captain Moore of the Crosscut piece on the Port Commission works for the the now behemoth, SSA Marine, Carrix Corporation, a major US defense contractor, and it is in SSA Mrine's interest to have a weak commission and a port executive over whom they have some sway. I recall that at the time about 6 years ago that the Port had caught this son of a general manager of a Unilever-owned major North Sea shipping fleet's attention - wonderful times,a kid on those 400 pound trawlers, my unquenchable love of freshly caught tiny North Sea shrimp boiled in their brine - I also talked at some length to the man, his name will come to me, who was in charge of SSA, every candidate payed their obeisance to him if only to gain SSA's support [look at the candidate's contributors! and the amount!], and I had an excellent in to this man via a friendship with a son of one of those many port companies that SSA Marine had gobbled up since it started on it rise, around 1947, and that gentleman was perhaps the most, no for sure, he was the most impressive person I talked to during these 15 years of my now fairly reclusive ways. I could see why he was revered, a form of paying extra respect. Captains of Industry like American generals can be impressive, some of them. Also met some first rate commissioners, especially Alec Fisken. Knew as much the first time I talked to him on the phone. The radar ear of a trained analyst! John Creighton is a man who has changed and learned since he got elected, impressively so. However, well run and profitable SSA Marine/Carrix may be, however well it treats its empolyees, its interests and those of the City of Seattle and of King County and the State of Washington do not necessarily coincide. I think Captain Moore would be more foresighted in taking John Creighton and the commentator GaryP's [above] advice and champion a statewide Port Commission, it would benefit them and the Merchant Shippers ASS, far more in the long run than the parochial, traditional SSA Marine symbiosis with the Seattle Port Authority