Latture Says Goodbye To Expanded Port

Paul Latture is driving through the Little Rock Port Authority, clearly taking pleasure in describing what he sees.

“You just left America,” he says as he pulls into the parking lot of the foreign trade zone.

He passes tanks filled with used oil to be reprocessed in Chicago and a silo full of cement imported from Italy. Aluminum ingots from Russia are headed to Malvern to become tin foil at an Alcoa facility. A pile of scrap metal is headed to China. A barge is being relieved of 80,000-pound steel coils bound for the port’s Welspun USA plant. They came from Russia, or maybe it’s Finland, or India, or Poland, or Germany, or South Korea.

“If you think about it … you jump in this water and start swimming, you can go anywhere in the world,” he said. “Anywhere in the world from right here.”

Latture retired at the end of June as executive director of the Little Rock Port Authority. His successor is Little Rock Assistant City Manager Bryan Day. The staff is small – just the executive director, an assistant, and a railcar crew of six – but the port’s impact on central Arkansas is huge. About 40 employers provide 4,000-4,500 mostly skilled jobs and support many others. Among the largest employers: Welspun, which has 331 miles of Keystone Pipeline pipe stacked in a field outside its facility; LM Windpower, which makes huge windmill blades; and Skippy peanut butter. Eighty percent of the port’s activity is inbound bulk materials, most of it coming from New Orleans, with steel and industrial goods its major product.

He points out that each barge handles the equivalent of 65 trucks. “If you want 1,650 tons worth of stuff, the barge is a remarkably cheap way to get it here,” he said.

The port is not tax supported and makes money two ways – unloading a barge or moving a rail car. Revenues from the sale of land are plowed back into the port’s infrastructure.

When he arrived at his new job in April 1999, the port was, he said, “stagnant.” Land hadn’t been sold in a while, and the port’s finances were weak. But about that time a partnership was forming between the port, the city, the Chamber of Commerce, and Entergy Arkansas. The port decided it had been undervaluing its properties, so it raised its available land from $15,000 an acre, where it wasn’t selling, to $40,000.

“Everybody said you’re nuts, but all of a sudden, it’s worth something,” he said.

With its dock maxed out on capacity, the port used a U.S. Economic Development Administration grant to build a second dock and increased barge traffic about 50 percent. A second grant doubled the dock’s size and added warehouse space.

The port also added land and invested in roads, rail and utilities to service it. When Latture arrived, it had 1,500 acres under its authority. Today it’s 2,640. About half a billion dollars in private investment have been spent during his tenure. About $30 million in public money has been invested in infrastructure.

“A lot of things just came together,” he said. “The industries started doing well. We ended up getting some infrastructure that we sorely needed. We added more capacity, and once we did that, then things started snowballing.”

The port is in a time of transition, and not just in its leadership. Most of its available land is on the wet side of the levy and, under terms of a federal grant it used to buy the land many years ago, can only be leased, not sold. Because it’s also low and susceptible to flooding, it’s hard to find takers. Only a 155-acre site and a 22-acre site are for sale on the dry side. It does have $10 million to buy land thanks to a one-cent sales tax package passed by Little Rock voters in 2011. Land is available in a couple of directions, but negotiations with sellers have not begun. Ten million dollars will buy the land but not develop it.

The port is building a $2 million office building on the banks of the Arkansas River, but Latture will not be moving into it. Now that he’s retiring, he plans instead to “beat a golf ball to death.” He’s also planning on traveling extensively with his wife.

Not by barge, though.