Harrington notes a variety of reasons why smaller markets like Savannah should beware of cruise ships. Interestingly, on the day that Savannah ended its flirtation with the cruise industry, Carnival announced that it was pulling ships from Norfolk, Baltimore, and Boston.

From Harrington’s op-ed:

For Charleston, the analysis that led to Savannahâ€s “no” vote is worth a look. The challenges facing terminals like Charlestonâ€s are growing. In addition to Norfolk, five similar terminals built since 2000 — Philadelphia, Mobile, Houston, San Diego and Honolulu — are either closed or operating deep in the red. Itâ€s not just the cruise corporations†tactics — their habit of pulling out with little notice as they follow shifts in the market — that should cause worry. Trends in the cruise industry suggest that strategic business risks for such terminals are rising as well.

Cruise corporations are building bigger ships, making those in the 2000-plus passenger range like the Carnival Fantasy a shrinking share of their fleets. Terminals that service older, smaller ships are going to compete for fewer vessels.

Marketing will focus increasingly on cities with mega-ship terminals such as Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Port Everglades. These ports already handle over 70 percent of all East coast cruise passengers; ports with smaller ships in the Southeast — Norfolk, Charleston, Mobile, and Jacksonville — together embark barely 5 percent.

The entire piece is well worth a read, especially a later passage about “the displacement of destination visitors” and damage to “unique historic values.”

It looks like the issue will die at Thursday’s City Council meeting, according to a detailed (and perhaps a bit dizzying to some) piece by Mary Landers in Thursday’s Savannah Morning News: Support for Savannah cruise terminal sinking

The last couple of paragraphs even suggest that alderman Tony Thomas, who largely is responsible for getting the city to consider the possibility of a cruise ship terminal, is backing away to some degree from the project:

Despite the likely “no” vote today, Thomas said the close to $250,000 the city paid for the studies (as well as another $80,000 from other state and local sources) was money well spent.

“One thing you can say about this task force is that it did its due diligence looking at Savannah as a possible home port,” Thomas said. “If anything the small amount of public money invested was wiser than going out and building a facility that wasnâ€t right, didnâ€t work or canâ€t be used. An example of that is the Hutchinson Island race track.”

From today’s Savannah Morning News piece about the just-released study of potential terminal sites:

The Savannah River Landing site near Presidentâ€s Street has emerged as the best option for a cruise ship terminal and berthing facility should the city decide to develop as a port for the cruise ship industry, consultants told the Savannah City Council on Tuesday.

The Savannah River Landing site, the only one of three proposed sites on the Savannah side of the river, edged out upriver sites at the Atlantic Cement tract near the Eugene Talmadge Memorial Bridge and the Powell Duffryn site near the Savannah International Trade & Convention Center.

“All three sites have challenges,” said Bruno-Elias Ramos, principal-in-charge of BEA Architects, which prepared the study for the city at a cost of about $190,000. “But we did not find any fatal flaws at any of the sites.”

First, keep in mind that BEA itself would benefit by the continuation of studies, and BEA would likely bid to build any cruise ship terminal here. Those are big red flags that, while not necessarily disqualifying, raise automatic concerns about the integrity of this entire process.

Click here to watch yesterday’s entire Council workshop session, or you can read in the SMN the list of complex — and no doubt very expensive — obstacles that the three considered sites present.

For the remainder of this post, I’m going to set aside the entire issue of whether a cruise ship terminal represents the best use of prime riverfront space or whether that model of tourism is one that will truly benefit the city. (Consider that we’re right now seeing huge investments in new hotels at both ends of River Street — and that’s without gambling millions on a cruise ship terminal.)

Instead, I’m going to focus here on the cost and the politics.

The Savannah River Landing site — deemed the best site considered — would require significant public expenditures for land acquisition ($10 million? $20? just guessing), for major upgrades to the sewer system, for considerable “enhancement” of the current bulkhead and riverwalk, for upgrades to the water system, etc.

And all of that would presumably come on top of construction of an actual terminal. There’s no cost cited in today’s SMN piece, but an article from March of this year noted BEA’s 2011 estimate that the terminal would cost $88 million.

Now, it seems like there are two ways to pay for this: bonds or SPLOST.

As I’ve said many times, I think many of the criticisms alleging over-the-top spending by the City of Savannah are unfounded, but the political reality is that many, many citizens — voters — do not trust that their tax dollars are being spent wisely and frugally.

Given the uncertainties of the cruise ship business, the simple fact is that there is no guarantee that a cruise ship terminal would be used. So we’re talking about a massive public investment with a reasonable likelihood of producing jobs and economic activity — but a reasonable likelihood is far, far, far from a certainty. (The publicly financed cruise ship terminal in Mobile is now sitting empty.)

At this point in the ongoing economic recovery, it simply seems foolhardy for the city to take on $88 million-plus in bond debt to pay for this.

And if the City of Savannah decides to commit a large percentage of revenues from the next SPLOST, which will be considered by voters in the fall, then there’s an increased risk of losing that vote. The current SPLOST was approved 60-40 in 2006, but since then we’ve seen a dramatic change in voter attitudes and we witnessed last year’s thumping of T-SPLOST, which had more built-in controls in terms of funding and project management than SPLOST does.

Given what we know right now, I’d vote against a SPLOST that includes tens of millions for a cruise ship terminal, and I suspect many others would do the same.

The city is going to have enough trouble selling the public on a SPLOST that includes big ticket items like the arena and the new police headquarters that voters thought they would be getting after the 2006 vote.

Maybe in a decade, after the City of Savannah catches up with major projects that were first planned years ago and after we get a better sense if the current woes in the cruise ship industry are the new norm, we could look again at the possibility of a terminal.

As I’ve noted, this entire question has been approached without any apparent input from the Georgia Ports Authority, which I’m guessing would have major concerns about the strict schedules of cruise ships.

And the entire process so far has been handled without adequate chances for substantive public discussion.

So it’s time to pull the plug on all of this. One could argue that we should continue the studies since that would only require another $90,000 — less then $1 per city resident. But continuation of the studies and the public debate would then drag the controversy right into the campaigns for and against the upcoming SPLOST vote.

If city officials move ahead with this project now, they will be imperiling some projects that Savannah truly needs.

The study has been completed by BEA Architects, which designs such facilities, so of course the document will argue for the viability of at least one site.

I’d love to have to eat my words on that last sentence, but, really, give me a break. Click here for more on the study.

But the question that we need to be asking before we waste any more public money and civic time debating this issue isn’t about the viability of the waterfront.

We need to be talking now to the folks at the Georgia Ports Authority, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Coast Guard (I guess they’d be the right people) about the viability of cruise ships in the same long channel that will carry an increasing amount of cargo traffic for the foreseeable future.

In fact, we’re on the verge of spending $700 million of public money on a massive economic stimulus project to increase the efficiency of private shipping companies that use the Savannah River. The deeper channel will allow larger ships and more heavily laden ships. Some vessels will no longer have to wait for higher tides before coming in from the sea.

We also have liquified natural gas (LNG) tankers that come routinely to the facility at Elba Island, and the frequency of those trips seems likely to increase too. As I understand it, river traffic is completely shut down when those tankers are in use.

So how are all these commercial interests going to react when they find out that cruise ships on relatively tight schedules have to use the Savannah River at specific times?

It seems sort of ridiculous to spend $700 million in large measure to speed up freight traffic and then turn around and lure cruise ships that seem likely to dramatically slow that traffic.

So before we get too deep into all this, it’s time for the folks at the Georgia Ports Authority to get involved in the discussion.

From the centerpiece story, FOUR-PART SPECIAL: A Savannah cruise port –– easy money or easy mark?:

Are these cities making easy money, as supporters say? Or are they, as critics claim, easy marks for a cruise industry that powers its way into waterfront communities with promises of generous tourist spending and job creation that seldom match projections and often come with economic, environmental and even cultural consequences cities seldom foresee?

Mayor Edna Jackson, then an alderwoman, sat in on some of the initial 2010 conferences as consultants offered glowing projections of Savannahâ€s cruise potential. The chance for economic development and job growth was a big sell.

“You could increase tourism, you could have jobs, even if they are entry-level, and our businesses might resupply a ship coming in,” she said. “Thatâ€s dollar generation. Thatâ€s job generation.”

Her initial enthusiasm has been tempered by the need to see the next study and discuss with City Council about how long it would take for a terminal to be self-sustaining financially, what the positives and negatives are and what it would mean to harbor deepening and container traffic already flowing on the Savannah River.

As I’ve noted before, I suspect the studies now underway will point to myriad problems with ships competing for time and space in the long channel with the growing cargo traffic, including the liquefied natural gas shipments that pretty much shut things down when a ship is present.

In the piece linked above, experts with no skin in the game express extreme skepticism of some rosy economic projections that have already been made by BEA Architects of Miami, which is the firm doing the study and which also might be the firm that would design an eventual terminal. Yes, you read that right, we’re going to get a study that’s going to seem biased from the outset.

The lead article links to the others in the special reporting, including one on some apparently shoddy work already done by BEA.

I’m sure we’ll be hearing much more about his in the coming weeks and months. I’ll be chiming in as news compels.

“Not in My Port, Charlestonâ€s Cruise Ship Opponents Say”

In this Southern coastal city that runs on history and hospitality, a raucous civic debate belies a genteel veneer.

Like several communities that hug the nationâ€s coastline, Charleston is struggling to balance the economic benefits of cruise ships against their cultural and environmental impact.

Last weekâ€s debacle aboard Carnival Cruise Lines†Triumph, in which an engine fire stranded 4,200 people in the Gulf of Mexico for five days, has done little to deter those civic leaders who believe that building a new $35 million cruise terminal will be a great boon for this port city.

But for people like Jay Williams, a homeowner in the historic district who writes a blog for Charleston Communities for Cruise Control, a preservationist group, the nightmare on the Triumph is one more piece of evidence in the case against a fast-growing form of travel.

And there, in a nutshell, is the debate that will heat up in Savannah over the next couple of years, if a study determines that we are even viable as a cruise ship terminal location. (My guess is that the heavy commercial traffic on the Savannah River — predicted to get far heavier in the coming decades — will preclude the possibility of cruise ships here, but that’s just a guess.)

The battle over cruise ships is largely one about “crowding out”.

In other words, if we devote a big stretch of riverfront to a cruise ship terminal and skew the downtown economy toward accommodating the cruise ship riders (and their cars), what other development will be pre-empted? What will happen to the downtown residential population and to quality of life? How will the cruise ship tourists — arriving in waves — impact our tourist-dependent businesses? Will an emphasis on cruise ships hurt efforts to bring higher-spending cultural tourists to town?

I posted about some of these issues a couple of weeks ago after a conference — held in Charleston — about historic seaports.

SavannahRed has a really interesting blog post up this week — “The Savannah Cruise Shake” — emphasizing the need for balanced debate about costs and benefits.

There have been a number of mentions in the press lately of Mobile, where Carnival pulled out after the city funded a terminal. As Adam Van Brimmer notes on his blog at SavannahNow, that terminal found a use this week: as the dock for the crippled cruise ship that leads off the NYT’s piece.

This is not a cruise ship, but I bet some ads for cruises will appear on this page:

Major hotel construction will begin soon at both the east and west ends of River Street. A couple of other new hotels will soon be popping up on available land along key downtown corridors.

On recent warm winter weekends, downtown has been crawling with tourists — a clear shift from the quiet days of the 20th century and from the slow pace during the recession. On Friday afternoon, I was on River Street with a visitor to the city and saw firsthand the steady stream.

The prospect of even more intense tourism has prompted a much more proactive stance from the Downtown Neighborhood Association, the Historic Savannah Foundation, and others concerned about the impacts.

The city of Savannah has commissioned a study of the viability of creating a cruise ship terminal in Savannah, but look for a major fight if that study suggests that we would be a good starting and ending point for massive cruise liners.

My guess, frankly, is that cruise ships will turn out not be viable in Savannah because of the increasing cargo traffic going to the port and the LNG tankers going to Elba Island (the latter force traffic on the Savannah River to come to a standstill). But that’s just a guess at this point.

And now this from Lesley Conn and Mary Landers at the Savannah Morning News: Charleston warns Savannah about cruise ships. From the article:

The cautionary tales came Thursday from our neighboring port city, but they were shared by others from Alaska and British Columbia and from Norway, Cozumel and Venice.

Once big cruise ships come to a city, they can overwhelm a communityâ€s resources — crowding streets, jamming sidewalks and attractions, contributing to pollution and generating far less in spending and tax dollars than is usually anticipated.

Conn and Landers were writing about last week’s conference in Charleston, Harboring Tourism. From USA Today’s preview of that conference, Are cruise ships ruining historic ports?:

The growing industry and plans by the South Carolina State Ports Authority to build a $35 million cruise terminal have brought lawsuits in state and federal courts.

Plaintiffs are concerned that pollution and congestion threaten Charleston’s historic district. City leaders say that the industry is being handled appropriately and that Charleston will never be a major cruise destination.

Concerns over the year-round industry prompted the National Trust to place Charleston on its “watch list” of endangered places and the World Monuments Fund to put the city on its Monuments Watch list.

And this:

Sam Jones, mayor of Mobile, Ala., is scheduled to speak at the conference. In his city, $20 million was invested in a cruise terminal in 2004. But later, Carnival Cruise Lines moved the liner serving the city to New Orleans. Now, Mobile has the challenge of paying for a terminal no longer used for cruises.

It’s certainly going to be interesting to see how all this plays out.

I’m going to continue to advocate for public policies (like measures to encourage greater residential density) that will create a more diversified downtown economy.