JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The Port of Jacksonville is our focus on This Week in Jacksonville: Business Edition. JAXPORT delivers more jobs than many of us probably imagine. And for the sake of Northeast Florida, the port is growing.
“So we had an economist come in a few years ago and we asked him how many jobs really are what we call port dependent?” Robert Peek said. Peek is the Chief Commercial Officer at JAXPORT.
“And that number was 26,000 jobs in Northeast Florida. And that is if the port disappeared tomorrow, those 26,000 jobs are literally disappearing,” he said.
Joining Kent Justice for the conversation are Peek, John Freeman from JAXUSA, and Paul Crawford from the City of Jacksonville. The port is a huge driver of employment, even beyond JAXPORT.
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“There are over 900 companies now in Northeast Florida that have offices in Jacksonville that do business at the port,” Peek said.
JAXUSA is an arm of the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce. Freeman said, “If you go back 20 years ago, I think that we spent most of our time educating companies where Jacksonville was and now with the new norms of the consumer expectation of fast delivery of goods overnight services. those rings have shortened, the supply chains have shortened to serve those expedited shipments of goods to our homes and to stores.”
“We are seeing now companies aware of these logistics attributes that we have here, whether it’s the port, whether it’s the confluence of three interstate highways, two major rail, three major railroads here in Jacksonville, that nexus where they can serve all of the population of Florida in a same day, trucking scenario or an additional 70 million consumers to the north and to the west of us in that same day,” Freeman continues.
Crawford’s role with the city plays an important partnering role.
“We’re the regulatory agency that helps all these companies get to the point where they open their doors. We do permitting and help them permit their projects,” Crawford said.
“We offer incentives if there’s a competition with another municipality or state, we’ll go ahead and offer incentives to the company to entice them to Jacksonville. But for those incentives, they would go somewhere else. So we organize and track the legislation through the city council and through the mayor’s office with regards to making sure those incentives happen and that business locates in Jacksonville.”
Crawford, Freeman and Peek join me in a discussion about the impact of the port on our region and how deepening the harbor has already seen benefits.