By Ira Breskin, gCaptain
STAMFORD, CT — Shipping industry executives are considering options to address Trump administration policy changes, under consideration or enacted, that could significantly disrupt operations, speakers said here this week at the 40th annual Connecticut Maritime Association annual meeting.
Containership operators, for example, are weighing radical reconfiguration of ship schedules to avoid costly ship call-based port fees being considered by the Trump administration.
Should operators decide to reroute their vessels to major US “load center” ports, at the expense of smaller secondary ones, to reduce exposure to new fees, “it would absolutely crush us,” said Bethann Rooney, port director for the Port of New York and New Jersey. “We need to prepare to work effectively,” she said.
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PONY/NJ is the busiest container port on the East Coast and among the busiest in the US.
The result “would be far worse than we saw on the West Coast during the (COVID-19) pandemic,” Rooney said during a presentation on Wednesday.
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