Port control or not, firm says it aims to work in this region

NORFOLK

Whether its bid to privatize the state-owned port in Hampton Roads succeeds or not, CenterPoint Properties Trust is here to stay, one of its top executives said Thursday.

The company, which submitted an unsolicited bid in March to essentially lease the Virginia Port Authority's terminals, has opened a local office and is preparing to begin work on a Suffolk distribution hub.

CenterPoint is serious about Hampton Roads no matter how its bid fares, said Neil Doyle, the company's executive vice president for infrastructure and transportation development. He spoke to about 200 people at a luncheon of the Hampton Roads Association for Commercial Real Estate.

While the West Coast dominates U.S. container trade because it's the closest route from Asia, 80 percent of the nation's population lives east of a line drawn from Dallas to Chicago, Doyle said.

" It's a pretty good bet to bet on East Coast ports, bet on Norfolk Southern, bet on CSX and bet on the industrial market represented in this room."

The expansion of the Panama Canal in 2014 is widely expected to lead to more container traffic on the East Coast, but Doyle said he didn't believe it would be as big a factor as many think.

"It's not so much that diversion as it is the population growth that will lead to higher volumes for the East Coast ports," he said.

CenterPoint, an industrial real estate firm based in Oak Brook, Ill., submitted a bid to state officials on March 12 seeking to take over the operations of the port of Hampton Roads for 60 years. It valued the bid at $3.5 billion in today's dollars but said it would be worth $8.9 billion to the state over the life of the deal.

The surprise bid opened up a process in which other companies also could bid to take over the ports. Competing bids are due by 10 a.m. Monday.

In January, the Suffolk City Council approved CenterPoint's application to build an "intermodal center." Featuring 13 warehouses with about 5.8 million square feet of space to be built over the next decade, the center will be about 20 miles from the Virginia Port Authority's terminals on U.S. 58, west of downtown.

Robert McCabe, (757) 446-2327, robert.mccabe@pilotonline.com