Grants raise hopes at Helena Harbor
HELENA-WEST HELENA — The head of Helena Harbor & Phillips County Economic Development hopes recent federal investments will help spur economic development in the port’s more than 6 miles of available space and has identified more improvements needed once the initial grant-funded work is completed.
Economic Development Director John Edwards said Helena Harbor was awarded two U.S. Department of Transportation Maritime Administration grants in October 2022. A Port Infrastructure Development Program grant for $6.41 million will fund an over-the-levee rail spur from the Arkansas Midland Railroad (which connects to the Union Pacific Railroad at Lexa) to the Helm Fertilizer facility and future tenants.
Edwards said Helm Fertilizer recently built docks designed to handle the rise and fall of the Mississippi River.
“If you’re on the river, you have to have a resilient rail system, because there are going to be those times where the river is going to drop so low that you can’t get a barge in,” Edwards said. “You’ve got to have an alternative to get things in and out. Having a strong rail system, as well as a road system, in place is pretty vital.”
Another grant will build a $500,000 elevated water tower for the port, important given the harbor’s distance from the city and for fire safety.
“A lot of people think you get a grant and then you get a check,” said Edwards. “Because it deals with construction, you’ve got to go through a series of environmental surveys, you’ve got to get your engineering work reviewed and approved, and we’re in the process of all those items now.”
An engineer is refining the plans and environmental permitting, which Edwards hopes will conclude later this year.
The Helena Harbor & Phillips County Economic Development began acquiring land for the harbor channel in 1971, raising funds and working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers through 1988. The slack water har
bor channel opened in 1995, and the corps continues to dredge regularly. Roads were built around it in the ensuing years, with work on Helena Harbor’s 60-ton overhead bridge crane in 2002.
“After the early 2000s, everything just stopped here at the port,” Edwards said. “After about 2003, nothing was being built, nothing was going on. You had this site where, literally, there was no activity.”`
Edwards, who staffed for former U.S. Sen. David Pryor, headed the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Arkansas Rural Development office and served as a state representative for Little Rock, has family from Helena-West Helena and began working at the harbor a decade ago.
“The biggest determining factor I’ve found in how a community does in getting funding, regardless of who’s in power, is, first, the ability to put together an application, and second, the ability to manage any funds they were given,” he said. “A lot of small communities struggle with actually getting applications turned in.”
Helena Harbor’s tenants today, in addition to Helm Fertilizer, are Mississippi Limestone Corp.’s boat- and barge-repair facility and Enviro Tech Chemical Services, which makes biodegradable liquid disinfectants. Outside of their footprints, less than 100 acres combined, Edwards said Helena Harbor has 4,000 acres ready for development.
“The reason that we have not developed and done what we need to do is that we never had the infrastructure,” Edwards said. “What we’ve been working on in my tenure is getting all the rail rehabilitated. We’re now an AT&T fiber-ready site. We have natural gas service that’s established. We’ve made a complete loop of our water line installation. We’re preparing to get the water tower under construction; hopefully we’ll be able to have it go out for bids later this year.”
The water tower may go up next year. After that, Edwards said the “last big boulder” would be installing a $6 million wastewater system, which he plans to pay for in stages through a variety of sources. Past funding has come from public and private sources like the Walton Family Foundation, the federal government’s Delta Regional Authority and the Arkansas Waterways Commission.
After improving infrastructure, Edwards would like to market the site to smaller businesses, seeing strength in having several employers rather than one big one, avoiding a hit like the 1979 closing of Mohawk Tire Company’s plant in town.
“We’ve had a wide variety of companies express an interest in our site, but the thing I really want to make clear … is that we have to have our infrastructure complete,” Edwards said.