Why Should Delaware Care?
The Port of Wilmington is one of the last anchors of good-paying, blue-collar jobs in Delaware. It also has suffered a string of financial blows over a dramatic six-year-period. How the state responds to the setbacks may determine the shape of Delaware’s workforce into the future.
Delaware’s quest to build one of the mid-Atlantic’s biggest port container terminals may have quietly cleared a key hurdle last month.
During a meeting on Monday of the state board that oversees the Port of Wilmington, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez said Delaware is no longer required to secure an approval from the Port of Philadelphia in order to move forward with efforts to recapture construction permits that a federal judge invalidated in 2024.
Delaware port officials need the permits to fulfill their longstanding, yet beleaguered, goal of building a new port at the site of a former chemical plant in Edgemoor. Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have already been committed to the project, which port officials say will create thousands of new jobs in the state.
Patibanda-Sanchez said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — which is in charge of issuing the permits — agreed last month to grant an exception to a rule requiring Delaware to obtain a formal ”statement of no objection” from the Port of Philadelphia – a regional competitor that has long opposed Delaware plans to expand the Port of Wilmington.
Internal port documents state that the Port of Philadelphia, as of last fall, had declined to sign such a statement.
Now, with an exception to the rule, Patibanda-Sanchez said the Corps of Engineers can begin its review of Delaware’s application for permits to build a port seawall, and to dredge the Delaware River from the Edgemoor docks to the main channel.
“And we’re very excited to have cleared that first step,” she said during the Monday meeting of the board of the Diamond State Port Corporation – the state-owned entity that oversees the Port of Wilmington.
Why does Wilmington need Philly’s permission?
The development follows years of turmoil that has plagued the Port of Wilmington and its $600 million expansion plans.
When the state privatized the port’s operations in 2018, the company that took over, Gulftainer, promised to privately fund the development of Edgemoor by doubling the shipments at the Port of Wilmington’s existing facility along the Christina River. Not only did those bold projections fail to materialize, but the port’s finances under Gulftainer also deteriorated.
Hopes for the port’s expansion were revived in 2023 when Delaware brought in a new operating company, Enstructure. But a year later, a federal judge invalidated the Edgemoor permits following a lawsuit brought by competing ports along the Delaware River, including the Port of Philadelphia.
The upstream ports sued the Army Corps of Engineers for what they said was a “perfunctory and inadequate review” of Delaware’s permit applications. While many in Delaware saw the lawsuit as part of a powerplay between officials at the ports of Wilmington and Philadelphia, the legal complaint alleged that ships leaving a future Edgemoor port would cause a dangerous marine bottleneck when turning into the river’s main channel.
In the sharply worded ruling issued in October, 2024, U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney stated that the Army Corps of Engineers had acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” when it issued the Edgemoor building permits.
He also criticized Delaware port officials for failing to obtain a statement of no objection to the permits from their upstream neighbor. The requirement was in place because the Port of Philadelphia had been the primary non-federal financial sponsor of a recent Delaware River dredging project along the estuary to deepen the shipping channel.
Kearney also stated that if the Corps of Engineers reevaluated the Edgemoor permits, it must address “navigation and safety issues,” and must ensure that Delaware “obtains a Statement of No Objection from the Philadelphia Port Authority.”
It is not immediately clear how the judge will interpret the Army Corps of Engineers’ recent decision to make an exception for the requirement.
Patibanda-Sanchez did not directly address the issue when asked by email why she believes the exception will pass muster with Kearney.
Instead, she said in a statement that Delaware’s port officials “continue our work on the Delaware Container Terminal project and are encouraged with the progress we have made so far.”
“We look forward to the USACE’s (Corps of Engineers’) complete review of our application. As we make progress on the permitting, we are also working on issues raised by the community and all the stakeholders involved with this project,” Patibanda-Sanchez said in the statement.