Port of the Week! - Charleston, SC

Charleston is apart of the rich tradition that is South Carolina’s maritime prosperity.

From the its founding as Charles Towne in 1670, to the Bennett Rice Mill in 1845, and all the way up to the port’s state-of-the-art opening of the Hugh Leatherman Terminal in 2021, the East Coast city owes it centuries of growth to its bustling trade activity.

While throughout most of its history, Charleston handled flows of agricultural commodities, the port has since diversified its portfolio in the modern age.

Charleston primarily facilitates containerized cargoes nowadays, like furniture, sporting goods, and electronics.

While the gateway was not immune to the freight slowdown the rest of the country has observed, Charleston has reported some positive news going into the final months of 2023.

Its port authority, SC Ports, handled 208,134 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUS) in July, with imports careening into Charleston at an elevated 12 percent clip from June and a 3 percent increase year-over-year.

One of unique features that separates Charleston from its Southeast competitors, like Jacksonville, Savannah, and Wilmington, is how its port authority, SC Ports, regiments equipment programs onto port users.

The South Carolina Maritime Chassis Pool: SMART Pool is the proprietary chassis service the Port of Charleston uses. The program is designed to offer shippers and motor carriers moving freight through facilities an available chassis fleet at daily rental rates.

Port users are encouraged to apply to the SMART Pool, pending certain requirements. Daily rates for a 20-foot and 40-foot container are currently $24.

While SC Ports itself stewards Charleston’s equipment pool, other Southeast ports follow a different model.

The seaports of Jacksonville, Savannah, and Wilmington endow this responsibility to Consolidated Chassis Management.

This administrative entity is rolling out a reconfigured program to the South Atlantic Chassis Pool (SACP), to which users at these three Southeast ports will have to comply with by October 1.

This new iteration of SACP suggests cheaper rental rates than Charleston’s, depending on certain instances.

CCM will use a five-tier fee pricing structure based on the number of usage days for a given client yearly.

For customers with less than 100,000 usage days per year, the lowest usage tier, CCM will charge $22 per chassis per day. For customers with more than 500,000 chassis usage days, the daily rate will drop to $12 per day.

So committed and regular users with healthy volume coming through the ports can see a monetary benefit under this reconfigured version of SACP.

However, CCM has also made it clear that it’ll be aggressive on compliance. For port users who fail to register to the new pool by the October implementation will be subject to a $100 day per day penalty if they pick up lease equipment.

In other words, the unregistered won’t be denied at the gates, but will have to absorb this triple-digit slap should they proceed to withdraw a chassis at these three Southeast seaports.

This updated program will also apply for inland Southeast locations in Atlanta, Birmingham, and Charlotte.?