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Tennessee’s Murray County Sole Commissioner Greg Hogan has a message about the place he’s spent his entire 55 years of life.
“Murray County is open for business,” Hogan said.
That’s in reference to the Appalachian Regional Port, an “inland port” under construction on 42 acres in Murray County on U.S. Highway 411, just north of the unincorporated community of Crandall. Shipping containers will be transferred from railcars to semi-trucks — and vice versa — after the port opens in October 2018.
The shipping containers will arrive in landlocked Murray County after a 388-mile trip by rail on CSX Transportation tracks from the Georgia Port Authority’s Garden City Terminal, just northwest of Savannah.
Opponents threatened a lawsuit in 2016 over the port, which one described as “in the middle of a hayfield, close to the Cohutta Wilderness on a scenic byway 22 miles from the nearest interstate.”
But the lawsuit never materialized, and Hogan said residents of the rural, sleepy county of about 40,000 look forward to the jobs the inland port could bring.
“It is a done deal. This port is here,” the sole commissioner said. “We need to utilize this thing, and we need to grow off it. We need economic development here — bad.”
Factors have aligned to make the port seem like a promising business proposition for Murray County.
The shipping industry is rebounding from a number of bad years, the Panama Canal has been widened to allow passage of huge, so-called Neopanamax ships making deliveries from such places as China and — even though a dredging project to deepen the Port of Savannah isn’t finished — some of those big ships are delivering their cargo there.
“We’re already receiving the bigger ships; they just have to wait until high tide,” said Ryan Macdonald, the Georgia Port Authority’s manager of strategic operations and planning.
| By Tim Omarzu Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times/Free Press
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