Transportation industry groups say priorities in Biden presidency should be infrastructure, pandemic. | 2020-11-09 | DC Velocity | The Supply Chain Xchange
Transportation industry groups say priorities in Biden presidency should be infrastructure, pandemic.
Incoming administration proposes $1.3 trillion investment over 10 years in the Highway Trust Fund, transportation sector competitive grant programs, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects.
Ben Ames has spent 20 years as a journalist since starting out as a daily newspaper reporter in Pennsylvania in 1995. From 1999 forward, he has focused on business and technology reporting for a number of trade journals, beginning when he joined Design News and Modern Materials Handling magazines. Ames is author of the trail guide "Hiking Massachusetts" and is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism.
Transportation industry leaders are pointing to two priorities for their goals in a Biden presidency beginning in 2021, urging the new administration to seek solutions to long-delayed infrastructure improvements and to stopping the deadly coronavirus pandemic.
The groups issued their statements following the news on Saturday that President-elect Joe Biden was projected to have won both the popular vote and the electoral college count, and is scheduled to be inaugurated as president on January 20, slightly more than 10 weeks from now.
“On behalf of the entire industry, congratulations to President-elect Biden on his victory,” Ian Jeffries, president and CEO of the Association of American Railroads, said in an emailed statement. “The President-elect is no stranger to America’s railroads, and the freight rail industry looks forward to working with his new administration to advance our shared goals including getting Americans back to work, strengthening the economy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The challenges his new Administration and our nation face are great, but the freight railroads want to be – and must be – part of the solution.”
One of the crucial groups responsible for creating new freight policies at the federal level is the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Following the election results, the chairman of that committee will continue to be Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), who on Sunday said the group would renew its focus on Infrastructure Week, the annual collection of legislative initiatives and press events intended to draw attention to the nation’s need for improvements to roads and bridges.
“The President-elect has made it clear he is ready to work with Congress to deliver results for all Americans with bold investments in infrastructure that help everyone, from large metro areas dealing with unreliable transit and soon to be jam-packed highways, to rural communities that suffer from bridges in poor condition and deteriorating roads,” DeFazio said in a statement. “President-elect Biden plans to ‘Build Back Better,’ and that’s exactly what our Nation needs to move our infrastructure into the 21st century while creating millions of family wage jobs, supporting U.S. manufacturing, and harnessing American engineering and ingenuity.”
Details of proposed infrastructure improvements on Biden’s campaign website say that the new administration calls for investing $1.3 trillion over 10 years on projects such as stabilizing the Highway Trust Fund to build roads and bridges, creating electric-vehicle charging networks, a national high-speed rail system, the development of low-carbon aviation and shipping technology, and infrastructure fortifications to withstand the effects of climate change.
More specific to the logistics sector, that plan also seeks to invest in freight infrastructure, including inland waterways, freight corridors, freight rail, transfer facilities, and ports. That focus would also roughly double funding, from $1.8 billion to $3.5 billion a year, for competitive grant programs like the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) Transportation Discretionary Grants program (formerly known as Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery, or TIGER) and Infrastructure For Rebuilding America (INFRA).
Additional freight sector improvements would “prioritize investments that will improve supply chains and distribution, reduce shipping costs, and boost U.S. exports,” the Biden website says. That would occur by increasing funding for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers by $2.5 billion per year, supporting infrastructure projects to keep goods moving quickly through our ports and waterways, as well as providing federal funding for lock modernization projects on inland waterways.
Groups seek plan to control the pandemic
Any plans to focus federal policies and investments on freight transportation in 2021 will also have to include a strategy to support economic activity during a prolonged coronavirus pandemic. Facing that challenge, industry groups also called on Biden today to renew the federal response to fighting Covid-19.
"We applaud Mr. Biden for making Covid-19 management and relief priority number one, and commend his efforts to build a Covid-19 Task Force focused on science, the health and well-being of all Americans, and the strengthening of the U.S. economy. We look forward to working with the Biden administration on these priorities in 2021,” Steve Lamar, the president and CEO of the American Apparel & Footwear Association (AAFA) said in a release. "Until a reliable vaccine is widely available, and the economy can regain the strength necessary to sustain itself, fighting Covid-19 using all our health and economic tools must be our top priority – both for the rest of 2020 and into 2021.”
"The extraordinary events of 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic have significantly altered life as we know it. SOCMA welcomes the opportunity to highlight the important role specialty chemical manufacturers play in the U.S. recovery with President-elect Biden and other newly elected leaders,” Abril said. “SOCMA members are creating lifesaving vaccines and pharmaceuticals, as well as consumer and industrial products essential in mitigating the impact of the disruption to American lives. To continue our vital role, SOCMA will advocate for business certainty and relief from regulatory burdens that could impede this goal."
Likewise, the Main Street Alliance, a trade group for small businesses, urged a focus on improved pandemic policies. “Small businesses are looking forward to an administration that will create a rational and effective plan to contain the virus and support small businesses through this pandemic and beyond. We are committed to working with the new Congress to ensure much-needed small business support. That includes a robust, comprehensive plan to deal with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and economic impact,” the group said in a release.
Supply Chain Xchange Executive Editor Susan Lacefield moderates a panel discussion with Supply Chain Xchange's Outstanding Women in Supply Chain Award Winners (from left to right) Annette Danek-Akey, Sherry Harriman, Leslie O'Regan, and Ammie McAsey.
Supply Chain Xchange recognized four women who have made significant contributions to the supply chain management profession today with its second annual Outstanding Women in Supply Chain Award. The award winners include Annette Danek-Akey, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Barnes & Noble; Sherry Harriman, Senior Vice President of Logistics and Supply Chain for Academy Sports + Outdoors; Leslie O’Regan, Director of Product Management for DC Systems & 3PLs at American Eagle Outfitters; and Ammie McAsey, Senior Vice President of Customer Distribution Experience for McKesson’s U.S. Pharmaceutical division.
Throughout their careers, these four supply chain executive have demonstrated strategic thinking, innovative problem solving, and effective leadership as well as a commitment to giving back to the profession.
The awards were presented at the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) annual EDGE Conference in Nashville, Tenn. In addition to the awards presentation, the leaders discussed their leadership philosophies and career path during a panel discussion at the EDGE conference.
The surge of “nearshoring” supply chains from China to Mexico offers obvious benefits in cost, geography, and shipping time, as long as U.S. companies are realistic about smoothing out the challenges of the burgeoning trend, according to a panel today at the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP)’s EDGE Conference in Nashville.
Those challenges span a list including: developing infrastructure, weak security, manual processes, and shifting regulations, speakers said in a session titled “Nearshoring: Transforming Surface Transportation in the U.S.”
For example, a recent Mexican government rail expansion added lines to tourist destinations in Cancun instead of freight capacity in the Southwest, said panelist Edward Habe, Vice President of Mexico Sales, for Averitt. Truckload cargo inspections may rely on a single person looking at paper filings on the border, instead of a 24/7 online system, said Bob McCloskey, Director for Logistics and Distribution at Clarios, LLC. And business partners inside Mexico often have undisclosed tier-two, tier-three, and tier-four relationships that are difficult to track from the U.S., said Beth Kussatz, Manager of Northern American Network Design & Implementation, Deere & Co.
Still, dedicated companies can work with Mexican authorities, regulators, and providers to overcome those bottlenecks with clever solutions, the panelists agreed. “Don’t be afraid,” Habe said. “It just makes sense in today’s world, the local regionalization of manufacturing. It’s in our interest that this works.”
A quick reaction in the first 24 hours is critical for keeping your business running after a cyberattack, according to Estes Express Lines, the less than truckload (LTL) carrier whose computer systems were struck by hackers in October, 2023.
Immediately after discovering the breach, the company cut off their internet, called in a third-party information technology (IT) support team, and then used their only remaining tools—employees’ personal email and phone contacts—to start reaching out to their shipper clients. The message on Day One: even though the company was reduced to running the business with paper and pencil instead of computers, they were still picking up loads on time with trucks.
“Customers never want to hear bad news, but they really don’t want to hear bad news from someone other than you,” the company’s president and COO, Webb Estes, said in a session today at the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP)’s EDGE Conference in Nashville.
After five or six painful days, Estes transitioned from paper back to computers. But they continued sending clients daily video updates from their president, and putting their chief information officer on conference calls to answer specific questions.
Although lawyers had advised them not to be so open, the strategy worked. It took 19 days to get all computer systems running again, but at the end of the first month they had returned to 85% of their original client list, and now have 99% back, Estes said in the session called “Hackers are Always Probing: Cybersecurity Recovery and Prevention Lessons Learned.”
As the final hours tick away before a potential longshoreman’s strike begins at midnight on the U.S. East and Gulf coasts, experts say the ripples of that move could roll across the entire U.S. supply chains for weeks.
While some of the nation’s largest retailers were able to pull their imports forward in recent weeks to soften the blow, “the average supply chain is ill-prepared for this,” Tom Nightingale, the former CEO of AFS Logistics, said in a panel discussion today at the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP)’s EDGE Conference in Nashville.
Despite that grim prognosis, a strike seems virtually unavoidable, CSCMP President & CEO Mark Baxa said from the stage. At latest report, the White House had declined to force the feuding parties back into arbitration through its executive power, and a voluntary last-minute session had failed to unite the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA)’s 45,000 union members with the United States Maritime Alliance that manages the 36 ports covered under their expiring contract.
The ultimate impact of a resulting strike will depend largely on how long it lasts, the panelists said. With a massive flow of 140,000 twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs) of shipping containers moving through the two coasts each week, each day of a strike will require 7 to 10 days of recovery for most types of goods, Nightingale said.
Shippers are desperately seeking coping mechanisms, but at this point the damage will add up fast, whether a strike lasts for an optimistic “option A” of just 48 to 72 hours, a pessimistic “Option B” of 7 to 10 days, or even longer, agreed Jon Monroe, president of Jon Monroe Consulting.
The first full day of CSCMP’s EDGE 2024 conference ended with the telling of a great American story.
Author and entrepreneur Fawn Weaver explained how she stumbled across the little-known story of Nathan “Nearest” Green and, in deciding to tell that story, launched the fastest-growing and most award-winning whiskey brand of the past five years—and how she also became the first African American woman to lead a major spirits company.
Weaver is CEO of Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey, a company she founded in 2016 and that is part of her larger private investment business, Grant Sidney, Inc. Weaver told the story of Uncle Nearest—as Nathan Green was known in his hometown of Lynchburg, Tenn.—to Agile Business Media & Events Chairman Mitch MacDonald, in a keynote interview Monday afternoon.
As it turns out, Green—who was born into slavery and freed after the Civil War—was the first master distiller for the Jack Daniel’s Whiskey brand. His story was well-known among the local descendants of both Daniel and Green, but a mystery in the larger world of bourbon and a missing piece of American history and culture. Through extensive research and interviews with descendants of the Daniel and Green families, Weaver discovered what she describes as a positive American story.
“I believed it was a story of love, honor, and respect,” she told MacDonald during the interview. “I believed it was a great American story.”
Weaver told the story in her best-selling book, Love & Whiskey: The Remarkable True Story of Jack Daniel, His Master Distiller Nearest Green, and the Improbable Rise of Uncle Nearest, and has channeled it into an even larger story with the founding of the brand. Today, Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey is made at a 323-acre distillery in Shelbyville, Tenn.—the first distillery in U.S. history to commemorate an African American and the only major distillery in the world owned and operated by a Black person.
Weaver and MacDonald's wide-ranging discussion covered the barriers Weaver encountered in bringing the brand to life, her vision for where it’s headed, and her take on the supply chain—which she said she views as both a necessary cost of doing business and an opportunity.
“[It’s] an opportunity if you can move quickly,” she said, emphasizing a recent project to fast-track a new Uncle Nearest product in which collaborating with the company’s supply chain partners was vital.
Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey has earned more than 600 awards, including “World’s Best” by Whisky Magazine two years in a row, the “Double Gold” by San Francisco World Spirits Competition, and Wine Enthusiast’s “Spirit Brand of the Year.”
CSCMP’s EDGE 2024 runs through Wednesday, October 2, at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel & Convention Center in Nashville.