Alter Logistics Company is ready to leverage state and federal dollars to grow and expand its busy operation at the city-owned Rock Island Intermodal Marine Terminal thanks to the new Rock Island Regional Port District.
Those new grant opportunities are being made available through the creation and organization of that Rock Island port and the recently created and federally designated Corn Belt Ports Region. The Corn Belts region has already attracted more than $2 billion in overdue Mississippi River infrastructure investment. (Read more about Corn Belt Ports and the local port districts here.)
“We’re pretty excited about this opportunity to directly work with a partner like the city and they’re keen to get going; they’re a keen partner,” said Paul Ferguson, senior vice president of Alter Logistics. That company, with deep Quad Cities roots, has leased and operated the Rock Island-owned terminal for more than 40 years and recently renewed its lease.
“The need for more commodities, or the more efficient movement of commodities up and down the river is not declining, it’s growing,” Mr. Ferguson told the QCBJ. Port districts, he added, can help finance the infrastructure needed to capture that growth.
He thanked the City of Rock Island and Mayor Mike Thoms for working to create the Rock Island port district. He also lauded Bob Sinkler, coordinating director of Corn Belt Ports, for being “a bulldog” throughout the successful efforts to create the Corn Belt Port regional system and supporting local port districts.
“He understands that this area desperately needs this kind of structure and with the structure comes this opportunity to go after these grant dollars to build this infrastructure up which is again needed as supply chains grow,” Mr. Ferguson said.
Making busy port busier
The Rock Island Intermodal Marine Terminal, located at 700 Mill St., is already a busy one and Alter Logistics and the city want to make it even busier.
“The whole premise of this business is all about providing this logistical, multimodal, multi-commodity transfer capability and it provides companies an access to markets that they perhaps couldn’t otherwise get to effectively and economically,” Mr. Ferguson said.
Since Alter began operating the Rock Island-owned terminal in 1981 it has borne the cost of big-ticket investments on its own. Among them are the more than $4 million reconstruction of the Rock Island levee’s seawall and the addition of a 40,000-ton fertilizer storage building. With the city’s port district designation future projects undertaken by Alter could become eligible for grant assistance that had previously been unavailable to private companies.
“The long and short of it is that it opens us up to the ability to partner more directly with the city to be able to go after grants that lead to the better, bigger expansion that we’re capable of,” Mr. Ferguson told the QCBJ. “There are a lot of exciting things that we can still do at this facility. By no means is it at capacity.”
Adding more docks and reconfiguring the terminal to get it ready for growth is a multi-million-dollar and multi-year effort. “If we’re left to do this on our own it’s going to take a lot longer – if ever we were able to get there, and so this grant money opportunity helps us get there quicker,” said Tom Streight, vice president of business development for Alter Logistics. “We can expand this port into a much bigger endeavor.”
The Rock Island terminal is referred to as a private terminal, “but we’re one of the truly public terminals. We’re truly open to anybody,” Mr. Streight added.
Potential expansions include adding two new barge docks to its two existing ones. Under the current arrangement, the terminal can only handle cargo from one barge at a time. Adding two docks and rearranging the old ones will help expand its capability.
So will helping relocate an underground pipe system that uses forced air to carry cement away from the terminal and move it closer to that company’s base of operation. That would allow Alter to create space to welcome more volume and more products.
The need is there
Alter already has companies looking to move more fertilizer and the Rock Island terminal could easily fill another 20,000 tons of space. But to do that, the logistics company needs to bring in more barges each day.
Not only do barges provide the cheapest form of transportation they also are the most environmentally friendly way to move cargo and commodities on the Mississippi River and Corn Belt Ports Region’s portion of that global grain artery.
Alter Logistics’ operation shows, however, that there is much more than grain traveling through our Mississippi River region. “Rock Island’s built out a pretty good diversity of products,” Mr. Ferguson said.
“Fertilizer is top dog; we’ve got aluminum that comes in by barge and rail for transport and it’s put in storage then shipped out by truck, and as a matter of fact, some of it is being shipped out by rail so it becomes a distribution facility.”
Other products include pig iron, lumber, steel and aluminum plates and organic soybeans. The facility also assists a customer with its industrial waste management solutions. Empty containers arrive at the terminal and are trucked to the manufacturing site. There, they are loaded with nonhazardous waste that cannot go into a regular landfill, returned to the terminal and transferred to rail cars and removed to specialized landfills for disposal.
Alter is already well positioned to compete for funding that will become available through the sponsorship of the new Rock Island Regional Port District.
The company has hired Prosody Group to prepare to make it happen. Prosody describes itself as an economic development consulting service with deep experience. That includes coastal and inland terminals, grain elevators, feed and fertilizer manufacturing, renewable power facilities and cement plants.
Alter’s ready to go
Mr. Ferguson said Prosody’s job is to take “what we want to do and write up the proposals for grant applications.”
Alter already has been compiling “a pretty significant list of ideas” for expanding the busy terminal which will give the logistics transloading services and solutions company a head start in going after grant money to expand the business.
If it’s successful in achieving that expansion, it won’t be just Alter Logistic that benefits. “It’s the trucking companies that service it, it’s all the people that live in and around there that we need to employ,” he added.
The terminal operation currently employs about 15 people. After it expands it could “easily” add another five or 10 employees. In addition, the terminal is located in an economically depressed area.
“So what we do and what we can do is provide good paying jobs with good benefits,” Mr. Ferguson said. Workforce development also is important at Alter Logistics. “What it takes to run an operation like this is, obviously, great people, lots of expensive equipment and our ability to be able to train people to operate efficiently and safely.”
“You know we’re moving a lot of big things around with big pieces of equipment,” he added. The company already brings in workers who have no basic skills in operating heavy equipment and trains them. New workers start small and work their way up to a big material handler on the dock wall.
The Alter leaders said the terminal probably moves some 200,000 tons of fertilizer alone.
After adding all the other products and byproducts the terminal handles, including the 75,000 tons of salt piled at the terminal that will be spread on Quad Cities area roadways later this winter, it’s more than double that 200,000 total, Mr. Streight estimated.
Dredging also is an ongoing and costly challenge. Some of that work Alter can handle with its own large cranes. But for deeper areas it must rely on busy contractors who cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then there is the lost business when those contractors are busy on jobs elsewhere and the terminal is forced to shut down for as much as three to four weeks during prime time.
If Alter could find someone to do its dredging annually there are grant funds available through the Rock Island port authority to help pay for it, Mr. Streight said.
Impact reaches beyond QC
Alter and the city aren’t the only ones who will benefit from investment at Rock Island.
The reach of relatively modest-sized terminals including Rock Island is often surprising.
Take the supply chain of products that come to the Alter-operated Rock Island terminal. Fertilizer comes from Morocco, is transloaded into barges and rail. When it comes to the Rock Island Terminal, it’s transferred to rail cars and sent all over including Canada.
The terminal also impacts the Quad Cities directly thanks to the massive mountain of road salt it stores and distributes before winter hits. It would be able to do that better and more efficiently with the help of government grants, Alter leaders said.
Here’s how. Today those tons of salt are unloaded from barges inefficiently using dump trucks, which then take the salt to a wheel loader. It takes about 3,500 truckloads to move a single barge load and then it must be piled up. By adding a system of conveyors, workers could move the salt from the dock directly to the pile.
Other projects under development by Alter are designed to expand the operation, to make it more efficient, and remove potential bottlenecks. Those things will help make it more economical which will attract more business because, Alter leaders said, adding that for the customers it’s all about their cost per ton.
“The more efficient we are, the more we attract, the more we can grow and the more people we can employ,” Mr. Streight said.
Currently, Alter Logistic runs only one shift at the Rock Island terminal. “If we could get more volume we could do a second shift and easily handle it,” he added.
Grants also can help grow the terminal’s already wide reach.
“When you think about the impact that this little terminal has on our bigger supply chain, some of these are multinational companies that need to get their products to market,” he said.
Alter Logistics Rock Island Terminal – at a glance
- Newly renovated 500’ seawall for barge access.
- Additional river access possible with other conveyed bulk and liquid materials.
- Served by the Iowa Interstate Railroad with reciprocal connection to the other rail networks.
- Access to Iowa Interstates 280, 80 and 74; and Illinois State Highway Routes 92 and 61.
- About 20 acres of open storage with asphalt and concrete pads for cargo.
- 3,000-ton concrete dome storage.
- New building development opportunities.
- 40,000-ton fertilizer warehouse.
- Inbound capable via barge, truck and rail.
- Outbound loading to rail, truck, container at 400 ton per hour load system.
CREDIT: ALTER LOGISTICS
A worker moves containers at the Rock Island Intermodal Marine Terminal operated by Alter Logistics Company.
