Indiana's ports.

• Author: Beck, Bill

One of the quiet success stories of indiana business during the past decades has been the resurgence of the state's port system. With three ports located on Lake Michigan and the Ohio River, the International Ports of Indiana have become leaders in maritime commerce from America's heartland.

At a time when many port directors natiownwide are wrestling with declining government revenues for infrastructure capital improvements, indiana's three ports--at Burns Harbor on Lake Micihgan and at Jeffersonville and Mount Vernon on the Ohio River--are enjoying a private investment boom perhaps unmatched anywhere in North America.

"We've booked $427 million in new private investment since 1990," says Frank Martin, executive director of the Indiana Port Commission in Indianapolis, the agency that supervises operations and policies for the three state ports. "We're one of the leading ports in the U.S. in new private investments."

Martin adds that the three ports have completed 85 percent of their necessary infrastructure improvements. "The Indiana ports will be unique by the year 2000 in that we'll be operating without governement subsidies."

Indiana's port system frequently labors in obscurity, but the maritime commerce facilities are an integral part in the transporation infrastructure that allows Indiana commodities to get to markets, both domestic and foreign. The ports also play a critical role in providing raw materials for Indiana Manufacturers.

Grain, coal, steel, petroleum, coke, machinery parts, fertilizer, forest products that cross the docks at the three ports. Because of its proximity to the steel industry on the south end of the Great Lakes, Burns Harbor does the lion's share of its business in import and export steel and heavy machinery. Similarly, small grains from Indiana's corn and soybean fields and coal from Southern Indiana and Kentucky are handled at the Clark Maritime Centre in Jeffersonvill and the Southwind Maritime Center in Mount Vernon.

Indiana is blessed with two separate and distinct outlets to foreign export markets. Burns Harbor is on Lake Michigan and handles cargo to and from the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway system. Clark and Southwind are located on the Ohio River; cargo comes in from ports up the Ohio River and is shipped downriver to the Mississippi River and its great port at New Orleans.

The Indiana ports will handle more than 14 million tons of cargo in 1993, with Burns Harbor in particular enjoying its best...