Charleston spent roughly a billion dollars building a container terminal, ran it for five years, and switched it off on Aug. 1.
Now the port is quietly asking private companies what they would pay to run it.
The S.C. State Ports Authority requested proposals in June from firms interested in taking over day-to-day management of the Hugh K. Leatherman Terminal, the 286-acre facility on the south end of the old Navy base. The SPA is still reviewing responses, has set no deadline, and is promising nothing.
"We have multiple parties interested in the Leatherman Terminal, and we're considering that as one potential avenue," CEO Micah Mallace said in the Post & Courier. "And we are looking at all the potential avenues."
Why it matters. If a deal happens, it would be the first time South Carolina handed a state-owned marine terminal to a private operator. That is not a small institutional shift for an agency that spent decades treating privatization as a dirty word. A state lawmaker floated the same idea in 2008 and got nowhere.
How it got here. Leatherman opened March 31, 2021, designed to move up to 700,000 containers a year. It handled almost 85,000 in the SPA's 2026 fiscal year, about 6.3 percent of the port's total.
Ocean carriers stayed away, at first to avoid a legal fight between the port and the International Longshoremen's Association that started two months before the first ship arrived. The union argued its new contract gave its members the heavy-lift equipment jobs that SPA employees had traditionally filled. The ILA won in early 2024 after the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and has run Leatherman alone ever since, with what the port calls an opaque and elevated labor-cost structure.
The outside read. Ron Brinson, a former North Charleston City Council member who ran the Port of New Orleans from 1986 to 2002, said the new ILA contract "sort of sprung a trap" on the SPA, leaving Leatherman in the crossfire between the union and South Carolina's politics. He also said Charleston's hybrid public-and-union labor model is getting rare. Only Savannah and a handful of others still use it.
"Most ports have a port authority-privatization relationship that is operated through leases. And it works pretty well," he said. "I've done a lot of consulting out on the West Coast, and they don't know what a hybrid model is."
Baltimore is the template. Its port authority broke ground in May on a $1.6 billion privately financed terminal at a former steel mill, scheduled to open in 2030 and managed by a division of Mediterranean Shipping Co. MSC happens to be the SPA's largest customer.
Mallace was blunt about what he is after. "It's whoever pays the most, of course, but also understands what we are solving for," he said. "And what we're solving for is growth."
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