On paper, the Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002 (MTSA) looks pretty good. The law promises to increase and improve security at ports around the country by mandating upgraded technology and tighter adherence to security standards, a worthy objective that virtually everyone supports. But Kurt Nagel, president of the American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA), says the legislation has a critical flaw: If federal funding for the program stays at the recently approved level of $150 million, he predicts, U.S. ports won't be able to comply and still remain viable.

In a letter to Thad Cochran, chair of the Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee, which oversees appropriations for the bill, Nagel noted that the Coast Guard's own estimates suggest that ports will need to spend $1.125 billion in the first year alone and more than $5 billion over 10 years. Nagel further pointed out that the present budget of $150 million represents less than 9 percent of the projected cost of compliance with the law.

Nagel instead is calling for a total of $610 million to be put into the FY '04 Homeland Security Appropriations bill, as approved in a recent amendment to the Senate's budget resolution. He showed that estimated costs (again, provided by the Coast Guard) for individual ports for such mandated security measures as improved lighting, fencing, gates, cameras, closed-circuit TVs, and communications devices are likely to hit roughly $2 million, although the actual cost will vary widely from port to port.

Inadequate federal funding to help ports comply with MTSA could undermine the sector's infrastructure and compromise their ability to handle growing trade volumes, Nagel says. "Every dollar that [ports] would have to spend on security enhancements to implement these security requirements is a dollar they can't spend on the infrastructure," he told Logistics Management. "It's money that's being taken out of what ports need to invest just to meet growth projections."

Going forward, however, Nagel believes it's likely that the necessary funding levels will be met. "Post-9/11 the immediate focus was on aviation security," he said. "There was a lot of emphasis put on it and a lot of money put toward it. More and more, [Congress is] starting to look at what other areas of our transportation system and our general overall infrastructure need to be protected. Clearly, public seaports, as parts of our international borders, are critical pieces of infrastructure that need protecting."