Ten years since its inception, PANYNJ's Council on Port Performance continues to keep the supply chain communication lines open
1/13/2025
By Bridget Dean, Associate Editor
After overlapping complications led to a massive cargo backlog in summer of 2013, officials at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) were reminded how important effective communication with operational partners is.
More than a decade later, a council created by current Port Director Bethann Rooney to facilitate communication continues to keep the port and its partners in critical information loops.
“Everybody in the supply chain is entirely dependent upon what’s going on upstream and downstream from them,” says Rooney, who has served as port director since 2022.
There’s nothing like a superstorm to drive that message home. The damage to the port’s cargo handling equipment following 2012’s Hurricane Sandy was devastating — an overwhelming number of chassis and trucks were out of service. The PANYNJ was understaffed, too, due to the International Longshoremen’s Association’s former policy of mandatory summer vacation time, Rooney says. Moreover, one of the port’s container terminals was going through a computer operating system upgrade, a process Rooney characterizes as an “abysmal failure.”
The combination of stressors shed light on how interwoven each of the port’s supply chain partners are, and that better channels of communication needed to be created so issues could be addressed proactively.
Bethann Rooney, port director, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Port Authority of New York and New Jersey“When there was a shortage of chassis, it affected the ability of truckers to pick up the containers, which impacted the amount of available capacity at the terminals, which then impacted ... the next arriving ships,” Rooney says.
On a Friday afternoon in fall 2013, Rooney — then PANYNJ’s manager of port security — crossed paths with then-port director Rick Larabee in the port’s main office. He mentioned his plan for addressing the backlog. She told him she might have a better solution and would think about it over the weekend.
She drafted a plan for facilitating open dialogue between port partners and shared it with Larabee on Monday. By week’s end, they were briefing the port board about the plan, which was put into action the following week.
A task force of port leadership held discussions over the next six months with hundreds of supply chain partners to understand what issues they were facing in their own sectors, how they impacted each other, and how to anticipate and remedy them. In summer 2014, a port performance report was published by the task force. The primary recommendation was to continue having open dialogue.
The task force, now named the Council on Port Performance, has volunteer member-representatives from PANYNJ’s supply-chain partners, including railroads, chassis owners, terminal operators, mechanics, labor organizers, shipping associations, trucking companies, ocean carriers and suppliers.
“We’ve got two Class I railroads, and we’ve got Conrail, the shared asset railroad operating here,” Rooney says. “While they may speak about their individual operational issues or concerns, they are coming to the table talking broadly about challenges and issues that need to be resolved.”
Problem-solving, pandemic style
COVID presented a whole new set of challenges and issues. Heading into 2020, cargo volumes at the port were strong. Rooney says the port authority was in a state of relative calm; in February 2020, the council had decided to meet every other month, rather than monthly. But when the pandemic lockdown began in March, the council had to convene daily to keep pace with changes in the supply chain.
Port officials learned ahead of time what problems to expect and what was causing them. When truckers said they weren’t able to return empty containers to the terminals, the port could pinpoint that ocean carriers, focused on delivering loaded containers, were not removing empty containers. In turn, those empty containers were piling up in terminals.
“That led us to take two steps. One was to create a container imbalance program that was implemented through our tariff, and that forced the ocean carriers to remove their empty containers within a certain period of time,” says Rooney.
The port also set up pop-up yards for the excess empty containers and cargo, which turned out to be necessary for the 28% increase in cargo traffic between 2020 and 2022 due to high consumer demand.
The PANYNJ hadn’t expected to handle that much cargo until 2030. In response, the PANYNJ took steps to prepare its infrastructure for the anticipated increase in traffic flow. In 2023, the PANYNJ started the ambitious Port Street Corridor improvement project, which when completed in 2028, will modernize the northern roadway access point to Port Newark and the Elizabeth Port Authority Marine terminal in New Jersey.
The Port Street Corridor improvement project will be the port’s construction focus for 2025, but there are other projects slated to begin this year, including the development of the Southbound Connector project. Rooney hopes to finalize a design and sign a contract for its development within the year.
“[It] is a rail project that would allow the traffic coming out of our largest on-dock rail facility to make a left out of the terminal and go south and bypass all of the other yards ... to head out to the Midwest,” she says.
There will also be a huge push for sustainability improvements in 2025. PANYNJ was selected in October 2024 to receive $344,138,135 from the Environmental Protection Agency’s clean ports program to work with terminal operators, drayage providers and the port’s own New York New Jersey Rail short line to implement battery-electric operations.
To Rooney, the biggest change since the council’s implementation is the relationships that have formed between partners, and the extent to which they’ve been willing to work together. Prior to the council’s existence, entities that weren’t direct customers of each other might not have communicated at all.
“The entity that pays the bill of the railroad is the ocean carrier. But ultimately, it’s the owner of the cargo who is entrusting the ocean carrier and the railroad to move their cargo,” Rooney says. “That customer, a Target, a Nike, a Ralph Lauren, a Bob’s Furniture — pick a store — they in the past did not have a relationship with a Norfolk Southern or a CSX. Because they weren’t the direct customer, even though it was their cargo being moved.”
Rooney’s role with the council has changed over the decade, too. At its founding, she worked behind-the-scenes in an administrative role. In 2014, PANYNJ recognized that the council was not a temporary fix, but a key component of a long-term strategy to improve cargo flow, PANYNJ promoted Rooney from her security role, which she had held since 2001, to become the assistant director of port performance.
When she became port director in 2022, Rooney assumed the role of council chairperson, becoming a forward-facing representative instead of working behind the scenes. Regardless of her council role, fostering communication among the port’s supply chain partners has been her priority.
“I’ve been involved since day one,” Rooney says.
