Why Should Delaware Care?
The Port of Wilmington is one of the last anchors of good-paying, blue-collar jobs in Delaware. But it also has suffered a string of financial blows over a dramatic six-year-period. State officials say they can transform the facility’s fortunes through an expansion of the port to the site of a former chemical plant in Edgemoor.
The biggest port operator on the Delaware River is suing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the second time in three years in an attempt to stop Delaware’s long-planned expansion of the Port of Wilmington.
Filed earlier this month by port companies owned by the Holt family of Philadelphia, the lawsuit claims the federal agency failed to properly account for maritime safety before issuing key permits to Delaware for its construction of a container terminal at the site of a former DuPont plant in Edgemoor.
Those permits allow crews to build a seawall and bulkhead along the Delaware River at Edgemoor and dredge the riverbed to connect the future port to the river’s primary channel.
Combined with land-based construction and equipment purchases, the Edgemoor project is expected to cost $669 million. Taxpayers will cover most of the cost.
The Holts’ legal challenge comes about a month after Edgemoor construction crews working under the disputed permits were given an official notice to proceed, according to Brian Devine, executive director of the state entity that oversees the publicly-owned Port of Wilmington.
“They were active on the river last week doing demolition and pre-dredge work,” Devine said Wednesday.
It is not immediately clear whether the lawsuit could delay the ongoing work. As of Friday, the Holts had not filed an injunction asking a federal judge to order a temporary halt to construction.
An official with Holt Logistics Corp., which operates port facilities in New Jersey and Philadelphia, declined to comment for this story.
The Delaware board that oversees the Port of Wilmington and its Edgemoor expansion said in a statement it remains “fully committed to advancing the Delaware Container Terminal Project at Edgemoor.”
The board is scheduled to hold a public meeting Monday at 2 p.m. in New Castle.
Competition among the ports
The Holts’ legal challenge marks the latest obstacle to Delaware’s decade-long effort to build a sister facility to the existing Port of Wilmington, which sits at the confluence of the Delaware and Christina rivers.
State officials say the expansion would transform Delaware’s shipping industry by creating thousands of blue-collar jobs and generating long-term economic growth. But that potential growth also sits at the center of a competition among regional ports for the riches derived from Delaware River cargo traffic.
In recent years, Delaware and Pennsylvania state governments have each committed hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to expand their publicly owned ports.
The Port of Philadelphia also contributed more than $140 million in the past decade to a dredging project to deepen the Delaware River. The federal government paid the remainder of the $400 million cost.
When first challenging the Edgemoor permit in 2022, the Port of Philadelphia partnered with the Holts’ companies to argue that the Delaware container terminal could cause a dangerous bottleneck on the Delaware River that would impact their ability to see a return on the investment made into a Delaware River deepening project.
In late 2024, those arguments successfully convinced a federal judge to invalidate the dredging permits for the Edgemoor project.
Over the following year and a half, Delaware officials reapplied for the approvals and submitted new analysis asserting that the Edgemoor terminal could be safe for marine traffic. The Army Corps of Engineers subsequently awarded the new underwater construction permits last spring.
While the award prompted cheers from state officials and union leaders, Holt Logistics President Leo Holt signaled his company’s likely legal challenge, telling Spotlight Delaware then that “the door is wide open for us to” file a new lawsuit.
In the new complaint, Holt’s attorneys argue that the Army Corps “uncritically relied on information” provided by Delaware officials when evaluating the impacts on navigational safety from an Edgemoor terminal.
The state-owned Port of Philadelphia did not join the Holts as a plaintiff in the latest lawsuit, and that port entity did not reply to a request to comment for this story.
