AMERICUS — Brad Lafevers, chairman, president and CEO Atlantic Western Transportation Inc. which operates the Heart of Georgia Railroad; chairman and CEO of Southeast Railcar Inc., and chairman and CEO of Cordele Intermodal Services Inc., was the speaker at Americus Kiwanis Club last week.

Lafevers gave an overview of the intermodal port located in Crisp County, which is already shipping goods by rail to and from the Port of Savannah.

Lafevers said that during the planning stages they realized that  Cordele in unique geographically, being about 190 miles from the Port of Savannah, and connected by two shortline railroads, the Heart of Georgia (HOG) and Georgia Central Railroad (CSX).

He said the shorter the distance the better for intermodal traffic.

“Most people would tell you it’s not economically feasible, but it is with short line railroads. Class 1 rail lines would really blow the pricing out the top.”

Another advantage of Cordele is that it sits right on the I-75 corridor and Highway 300 which accesses southwest Georgia.

“The Port of Savannah has grown dramatically,” Lafevers said. “It’s the fastest growing east coast port. The Panama Canal is being widened and deepened, and the project will be completed in 2014, when bigger container ships will be coming in.”

For comparison, he said the ships you watch passing from your hotel room on the river in Savannah might look impressive, but the new ones will “make the ones you’re seeing look like pups.”

Cordele is also fairly rich in property. Crisp County optioned 1,150 acres on the east side of Cordele for the intermodal port. It has direct access to HOG and CSX.

Lafevers said the new intermodal port will ultimately have a tremendous impact on the region.

“What this could mean in the long pull is that this can become, depending on who lands here in industry, another west coast hub as well (instead of Atlanta) somewhere down the road,” he said.

The intermodal port provides shipping services to Southwest Georgia, Alabama, the Florida Panhandle and Mississippi.

Among the advantages of this port are environmental.

Lafevers said, “It will cut carbon emissions with a rail centric method of shipping. Rail does far more minimal damage than trucks do on the highways. I am not here to slam the trucking industry. Intermodal is two modes of transportation and ocean freight is three modes.

“We’re not anti-truck ...  but if we can reduce the number of trucks beating up and down our interstates that produce wear and tear out there and save millions and millions of dollars per year in repairs.”

Another such advantage is also environmental.

“The Port’s own study talks about the particulate matter removed from the air by using rail,” Lafevers said.

So that’s the geographical advantage and the environmental advantage. But there is a third, which will help to grow the region.

“This facility will be multi-pronged in service, but one of the things is it will help to attract businesses to the state of Georgia,” Lafevers said. “There’s an old saying in our business that industry follows infrastructure.

“There may be a little of ‘build it and they’ll come’ involved here, but we’re not ever quite that radical in what we do, but seeing the opportunity and an existing base of customers, we certainly felt like the investment was solid enough here that over time with the property that’s available, with the service that’s available and now with the multi-modal operational infrastructure that’s out there, that this will become a haven for new industries that don’t want to locate in Savannah or Atlanta. It will really give Georgia another an opportunity to bring industry in and it creates a major reduction in truck traffic between Savannah and the I-75 corridor. It attracts these news businesses and creates jobs. That’s key.”

When a question from the audience asked how the trucking industry views the intermodal port, Lafevers said that five years ago, they went before a state Senate Committee hearing on the port and a representative from the Georgia Motor Trucking Association was there in support of the project.

“Trucks dispatched to Savannah can often face gate waits of four or five hours and the same wait to get back out. That’s a day wasted sitting over there. Send that same truck to Cordele, and he’s in and out in 30 minutes.

“As this thing grows and develops it really creates another opportunity for trucks.”

How will Sumter County draw industry and jobs from something in Cordele?

Lafevers compares it to an earthquake epicenter which radiates energy out in rings.

“Cordele will be the hot spot for those people who are high volume,  rapid speed users of the port. Those folks will want to be as close to the facility as they can possibly be, but that doesn’t mean that everybody who comes in there needs to be sitting in the back yard.

“What I told the folks in Sumter County here who cut the deals and try to run people down, there’s a lot of cases that if they have a choice between Cordele-Crisp County and Sumter County, it’ll really come down to whoever makes them a better deal because it’s not imperative that they’re sitting right in there.”

Lafevers looks forward to the future.

“As this thing grows regionally, you’ll see the roll-out impact of this over time. It won’t be immediate but the way to view this is that once the impetus for this area  — one year, five years, 10 years,  20 years down the road — there will be regional job growth. You start to build a better tax base in a region again, it just rolls out and spreads out. Crisp and Sumter counties have formed a joint development authority. These are great buzz words when you go looking for grants. Any time you bring in more than one entity it just makes it a whole lot easier to qualify for grant money.”

Lafevers shared data from a study done by Georgia Tech on what it takes to haul a container round-trip from Savannah into Early County versus bringing it 190 miles inland by rail ,then round tripping it off the rail head. The latter method has economic benefits.

“If you go back further east, it doesn’t work,” he said. “Once you start getting further north, even some of those counties like Carroll County, that’s probably fairly marginal savings because you’re about to bump up against all the Atlanta terminals.”

Lafevers said the Port of Savannah has the ability to tap a new market by utilizing this intermodal port facility.

“Containers that they’re currently losing to Mobile or to some other port can be worked back to Savannah with this port. Savannah has been a great help in getting this project.”

Among the intermodal port’s current customers and those they’re lining up are Mulcoa (kaolin), Big Tex Trailers in Cordele (1,500 container loads of tires each year), frozen food and refrigerated food.

“The bigger element is what we talked about in terms of economic development — there are two or three substantial companies in the pipeline who are currently looking a Crisp County-Cordele. Some of those will be hundreds of jobs. The wheels are starting to turn in that direction. There have been a lot of people frankly looking over the fence to see if this thing was going to work. It has been a little bit of an arduous situation at times to get it to the point where we are, but we are running trains now and things are going well. We’re excited to be where we are.”