New director faced with setting stalled Port of Baltimore back on course

Jonathan Daniels was just weeks into his new role as head of one of the nation’s busiest ports when his job changed overnight.

Since the March 26th collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, Daniels has instead overseen a nearly closed Port of Baltimore. The executive director of the Maryland Port Administration since Feb. 5, Daniels now spends his days pursuing goals that may seem at odds, steering the port through a calamity while planning for its growth.

A 30-year-veteran who has managed ports through hurricanes and a global pandemic, Daniels said Friday he feels confident Baltimore’s port will see a resurgence when the crisis ends.

“We’re confident that we’re going to get [cargo business] back,” said Daniels, a 55-year-old native of upstate New York who previously headed Port Everglades in Florida and the Mississippi State Port Authority.

“While we’re dealing with this catastrophic event, we have not lost sight of the fact that there’s still a port to run,” he said. “I came here to work with this port team on managing the assets … while setting forth a plan to grow our lines of business.”

In the weeks since the Dali freighter struck the bridge, collapsing the span and killing six construction workers, authorities have been working to recover bodies of two of the men who remain missing while clearing the Patapsco River of bridge wreckage.

Already, Baltimore’s port has reached a milestone with the opening Thursday of the first deep-draft channel since the collapse, allowing five vessels that had been trapped by the wreckage to leave and another five to bring in cargo such as dry bulk material and some empty vessels that will load at Baltimore’s docks. That 38-foot channel was the fourth to open, besides others ranging from 11 feet to 20 feet that have let smaller vessels and barge traffic resume, including 14 million pounds of raw sugar delivered this week to Domino Sugar’s Inner Harbor refinery.

It’s too soon to say how much of an economic boost can come before the temporary channel is closed in a few days until May 10. Some of it is weather dependent and all is under the direction of the Coast Guard.

Each day, sometimes multiple times, Daniels joins briefings on salvage effort progress at the Unified Command headquarters with federal, state and local officials.

But much of his time is spent communicating with stakeholders and businesses that use the port.

When businesses ask what they can do to help, they are told, “You can come back when the channel opens,” he said. “We want to make sure that while this is catastrophic, that they understand that this is a temporary blip, this is not the long-term view of the port that we’re going to have a channel that’s always going to be closed.”

But ports operate in very competitive environments, and business often moves from port to port because of efficiencies and cost.

“We’ll evaluate all those aspects to make sure that the value proposition for Baltimore remains the same,” Daniels said. “We’re asking them to be part of the long-term rebound and growth of the port.”

And many customers have reacted favorably, he said, because Baltimore is essential to their supply chain needs.

Other East Coast ports have “stepped up” to handle diverted cargo, Daniels said, but “when this is over, we want our cargo back, and we will do what’s necessary in order to be able to get that and be able to support the businesses that have lost business.”

Scott Cowan, president of the International Longshoreman’s Association Local 333, which represents many of the port’s dockworkers, said he has appreciated Daniels’ accessibility and responsiveness while longshoremen have been out of work.

“He is a friend of labor and that helps,” Cowan said Friday. “We are very lucky to have him.”

Daniels comes from a family of dock workers, but still says he “stumbled” into port management. Both his grandfather and father worked as longshoremen at Port of Erie in New York. His father went into the Coast Guard, and later became a college football coach.

Daniels graduated from the Citadel in South Carolina and became a football coach himself at the Maine Maritime Academy, which trains students for maritime industry careers. He took a job in the commandant’s office and got to see port operations up close. He attended a masters program at the academy and was hired to lead a small port in Maine at age 26.

In an interview Friday, Daniels said the Port of Baltimore is unlikely to recover what the port administration estimates is  $190 million of economic loss per day during the shutdown, but once channels reopen, he expects business to rebound.

“What we can do is we can get back to a position where day in and day out, we’re conducting the business of the Port of Baltimore and that the cargo levels have returned to normal, or pre-bridge incident,” he said.

Ports plan for catastrophic events, but not like this one, Daniels said.

“It’s changed the entire flow of people and cargo north and south through the city,” he said. “It’s going to impacts how the port conducts its operations.”

The port, which incudes 33 private marine terminals and six publicly owned terminals, had an annual economic impact of about $70 billion.

Daniels said the long-term, 20-year master vision plan that the port administration is beginning work on is needed now more than ever. It will be accompanied by a more flexible strategic business plan to be completed this year. The plans will take into account work to recover from the shutdown and ways to maintain and grow business during what could be years for a new bridge over the Patapsco to be built.

Long-term goals include boosting container cargo business at Seagirt Marine Terminal in partnership with operator PortsAmerica Chesapeake and at Tradepoint Atlantic in Sparrows Point, as well as increasing roll-on/roll-off and bulk cargo business. The port also is looking for ways to fit additional cruise lines into the schedule of the single berth at the port’s cruise terminal.

“The more tons we move through here, the more containers we move through, the more hours there are for the longshoremen, the more distribution centers that are developed, and ultimately more jobs are created,” Daniels said.

Baltimore’s port has built in geographic advantages because of its accessibility to markets in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. It has been the nation’s top port in terms of imports and exports of autos, light trucks and “roll-on/roll-off” equipment for 13 straight years.

Daniels succeeds former Maryland Port Administration Director William P. Doyle, who abruptly resigned last June.

Daniels said he was attracted to the port’s top job, in part because it “has one of the best reputations in the maritime industry. It’s a hardworking, close-knit waterfront with a very strong labor component.”

Some of his confidence about Baltimore port’s future comes from his experiences with ports that have dealt with adversity.

He served as executive director and CEO at the Mississippi Port Authority in Gulfport several years after Hurricane Katrina hit the area and wiped out port operations. The rebuilding had stalled when he arrived in 2013, but he was able to complete the project five years later. And he directed Port Everglades, the world’s third busiest cruise home port, during the pandemic when cruises were canceled. The port used that down time to go after and sign up luxury cruises and came out of the pandemic in a stronger position.

“You expect working in the port industry — everything we do here is large — when things go wrong, they go very wrong,” Daniels said. “But never did I expect that something like this could go wrong.”