At last, a TAD-worthy, win-win project?

Click on images to enlarge.

Tuesday afternoon, I ran into my old friend Wyman Westberry coming out of Walmart. For those who don't know, Wyman was the original builder/owner/operator of all of the Mom&Pop stores which he sold to the "Green Cedars" folks. Wyman still has remaining business interests in Camden County. He tells me he now spends about 3 days per week in St. Marys looking after those and 4 days per week at his farm, a little north and west of Jesup, where he is raising "a few hundred head" of cattle. The conversation soon turned to local politics. We were talking about industrial development - or more precisely, the lack thereof. That's when he told me of a couple of documents he received back in April from the Savannah District Office, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I found his description so interesting and was so amazed I had not heard of the Kingsland project involved, that I asked if I could get a copy. It so happened he had one readily available, so I followed him back to his office (still where it always was). Here's the deal. The ports of Savannah and Jacksonville are both on the cusp of a huge expansion of their container handling capacity. As a result, they both share a similar problem: limited room for container staging and bottlenecks for truckers coming and going. The proposed solutions are identical. The plan is to build off-site locations where the containers can go from ship to train to off-site handling and warehousing locations. The one in Savannah will be in Port Wentworth, on the doorstep of the Garden City Container Berths of the GPA. The proposed solution for the expansion on Blount Island / Dames Point is to haul the containers by train to a new handling, warehousing, and trucking center in Kingsland. Where? Well, refresh your memory by clicking on this link. http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/111507/geo_217793932.shtml

. Okay, so back to the container handling facility. You can see where it will be located in the first illustration above. That shaded area represents a 1,816.42 acre tract within the 15,000 acre development. Containers would come up the existing rail lines from Blount Island / Dames Point, then be diverted into the handling facility. There they would be offloaded. Some would be picked up, unopened, and further shipped by tractor trailer to their end destinations. Others would be unloaded into warehousing for sorting. The contents would then be repacked to fill orders , then shipped out by tractor trailer. This will generate hundreds of reasonably well paying jobs. I would hope that it would also lead to the four laning of Hwy 17 all the way from the 17 / I-95 intersection in Florida to the 17/ I-95 junction in Glynn County at Exit 29. It occurs to me that if that part of the 15,000 acre project could be built first and a TAD would help get it done sooner rather than later, it might well be worth considering.