Fresh Loaf

The New York Times had a piece this weekend examining how Savannah is faring during the economic downturn. Cargo shipping in the city — the fifth-largest along the East Coast — has flattened. Jobs have been cut at the ports while facility expansion has been ordered to go ahead. And then there’s this:

While [Georgia Ports Authority executive director Doug Marchand] and many others await an upturn, Savannah’s economy deteriorates. The unemployment rate in the three-county metropolitan area has jumped to 5.7 percent from 3.9 percent a year earlier. Analysts attribute the jump to hiring freezes and a lot of little job cuts.

With home sales down 24 percent, the local Coldwell Banker has watched its army of real estate brokers, the largest in the city, dwindle to 180 from 240 last year. “They just went into other businesses or stopped working altogether,” said Connie F. Ray, chief executive of the Coldwell operation here, adding that through last year brokers had been averaging $40,000 to $50,000 annually in commissions.

Manufacturers still have a big presence here, employing 15 percent of greater Savannah’s 171,000 workers, but factory employment is shrinking. Georgia-Pacific, for example, which makes paper towels, napkins and toilet paper at a mill here, no longer hires dozens of contract workers. They had been used as a flexible work force, a supplement to the 1,200 regular employees, to step up production during demand surges, now nonexistent.

Not all of Savannah is hurting, the article says — five hotels are under construction and Fort Stewart’s expanding. Luxury jetmaker Gulfstream is headquartered in the city; a company spokesperson says a long list of backorders will keep its workers busy for at least the next three years.

And there’s another sign of hope:

“When I go by a Red Lobster inn on the south side on a Friday night,” [John C. Helmken II of Savannah Bancorp] says, “there are people lined up waiting to be seated.”

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From the Savannah Morning News:

On Tuesday, port workers, longshoremen, truckers and others at the port of Wilmington, Del., became the first workers in the nation to enroll in the Department of Homeland Security’s national Transportation Worker Identification Credential program.

Those with business at Georgia’s ports won’t be far behind. The program is expected to begin locally by the end of next month.

The TWIC program ensures that any individual who has unescorted access to secure areas of port facilities and vessels has received a thorough background check and is not a security threat.

(Read more)

More than six years after 9/11, and after countless reports explaining how commercial seaports would be among the easiest way for terrorists to smuggle radioactive material into the United States, the Bush administration is just now getting around to checking the backgrounds of port workers.

If you support Bush, you support leaving the United States needlessly vulnerable to terrorists. How many more examples do you need?

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