Men's Breakfast

The men of First Presbyterian Church in Freeport meet on the second Saturday of each month for breakfast at 8 a.m. Join us! Visitors are always welcome and there is always plenty to eat.

The next Men's Breakfast will be July 8 at 8 a.m. Watch this page for announcement of the featured guest. There will be no Men's Breakfast in June.

Men's Breakfast, April 2006

The Men's Breakfast Group met Saturday May 13 with Phyllis Saathoff and Mike Wilson from the Port of Freeport as featured guests.

The Port of Freeport has grown considerably over the last few years due to its closeness to deep water and an aggressive marketing campaign. The forty-five foot channel has helped and the planned sixty-foot channel will help more. Major operations are the import of bananas and export of rice. More generalized container cargo is also becoming important. The liquefied natural gas terminal will also be an important feature of the area's economy.

The sixty-foot channel will increase the number and importance of ships that can use the harbor, especially since ships keep getting bigger, and the bigger ships take an increasing portion of the cargo. The Army Corps of Engineers has increased the priority of the channel deepening so it is more likely that it will be done sooner rather than later. This will allow Freeport to steal a march on competing ports.

One necessity of a port is the landside transportation available to it. A fear raised at a previous breakfast was that 5000 trucks a day could be going through Freeport , making the city uninhabitable. This worry was refuted. At most 500 trucks would go though the port and most would go up Rte. 332 or Rte. 36, not through the center of the city. There was also discussion of railroads. Union Pacific is a monopoly and knows it. There has been discussion of building a short line railroad to compete, but nothing has come of it and it has mostly been used as a bargaining tool for lowering shipping rates. There was some discussion about routing the railroad along the levee instead of the bridge, but there are some problems with this plan. It was also brought out that the military needs a double track to a port in order to use it. The military needs to be able to move a trainload of equipment to the ship while the previous train is leaving. This makes it difficult for the port to compete for military business.

The port is responsible for several thousand jobs in the area supporting the port and at businesses using the port. The obvious jobs are longshoreman's jobs. These jobs have changed considerably in the last few years. Previously, a longshoreman's job was hard physical labor and sporadic since ships only occasionally entered the port. Now the jobs are essentially full time and consist of operating equipment for moving containers around.

American Rice has been bought by a Spanish company with a much better business sense than the former management. They are now profitably exporting all the rice that Texas can produce and bringing in rice from Mississippi and Arkansas . Since they are a Spanish conglomerate they plan on importing cookies and olive oil from Spain . Phyllis has visited their factory is Spain and says it is highly automated and that they make excellent cookies. The olive oil will be brought over here in bulk and bottled in Freeport . This will create several factory jobs in Freeport . It will also create a local market for local chemical companies for the resins used to make the bottles.

The port has bought property in the East End for potential expansion and as a method of urban renewal. The most obvious recent instance is the New Jerusalem Baptist Church. Phyllis said that all the purchases have been voluntary and usually the owners have come to them, including the New Jerusalem Baptist Church.

Phyllis invited us to come take a tour of the port, preferably when a ship is due to come in.

As usual, the men enjoyed an informative discussion and a good meal. There will be no men's breakfast in June because George Bettoney will be at the State Democratic Convention and there were no volunteers to take over for the month. All men are invited to the next breakfast in July.