Map showing Lazaro Cardenas port. The News Tribune reports that the ports of Tacoma and Seattle and several others are lobbying for Congress to rewrite the Harbor Maintenance Tax so that containers landed in Mexico and Canada will have to pay the same tax when they are imported into the U.S.
A Danish shipping terminal operating company has won the right to build a new deepwater container terminal at the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas. That new $900 million facility on Mexico’s Pacific coast will bring new competition to American West Coast ports for business feeding imported goods to the Midwest and South. APM Terminals, a division of Denmark’s A.P. Moller-Maersk Group, is scheduled to complete the first phase of the four-berth terminal in 2015. That Mexican port is connected to the U.S. by a branch of the Kansas City Southern Railroad. Like the relatively new container terminal facility at Prince Rupert in British Columbia, the Mexican port will have a built-in economic advantage over West Coast ports in the U.S. in that containers imported through those foreign ports aren’t subject to the U.S. harbor maintenance tax.
