DC Velocity - February 2012

structure policies as anything else.

The HMT is assessed on imports at all U.S. ports, but not all of them require dredging or other harbor maintenance work. Consequently, HMT revenues are redistributed from big import gateways with naturally deep channels—such as Los Angeles, Seattle, and Tacoma—to ports with smaller import volumes that require dredging to maintain channel depths and widths. According to a January 2011 report by the Congressional Research Service, these and similarly positioned ports typically receive just one penny’s worth of benefit for every dollar of HMT revenues their imports contribute to the Harbor Maintenance Tax Fund.

That disparity—along with the unspent billions of dollars in the fund—is as big a concern for U.S. ports as cargo diversion. Many of the comments filed with the FMC charged that the HMT system is broken and must be fixed now.

The Port of Seattle’s filing summed up a widely supported prescription: Fees assessed against freight movement should be spent on improvements to the freight system; fees collected from one gateway or trade corridor should benefit the users of that gateway and corridor; and user fees must be applied universally and equitably to all U.S.-bound cargo, without putting U.S. gateways at a competitive disadvantage to Mexican and Canadian ports.

Ultimately, some filers said, the HMT issue is just one
symptom of a larger problem: the failure of the U.S. gov-
ernment to develop and implement a national freight trans-
portation strategic plan with sufficient, dedicated funding
for infrastructure projects.

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