A1A South

JACKSONVILLE — The Jacksonville Port Authority’s No. 2 executive will be in South Korea the week of March 17 working to finish a development and lease contract to build the port’s biggest container terminal.

The authority and Hanjin Shipping Company Ltd. have been negotiating since signing a memorandum of understanding Oct. 18, 2007, at Hanjin’s headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, regarding a proposed 170-acre terminal.

Negotiations have been tough, said Ron Baker, the authority’s chief financial officer and deputy executive director, with both sides looking out for their stakeholders’ interests. But despite the memorandum of understanding’s expiration date looming in mid-April, he’s confident his trip will close or nearly close the deal.

The memorandum of understanding calls for the port authority to finance $230 million to develop the terminal and $120 million to pay for equipment and other operational resources. It also calls for Hanjin to pay the principal and interest on such financing.

“We’ve been crystal clear from the outset that the financial responsibility for the terminal will be theirs,” Baker said. “If someone wants to come here, they have to have skin in the game.”

The time between the initial announcement and signing a lease contract has been longer than what was seen with Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Ltd., which will open a $230 million, 158-acre container terminal in January 2009.

Read the rest in Jacksonville Business Journal.

It’s for the good of Jacksonville, I suppose, but the expansion of the port meant that a lovely, quiet neighborhood on the river with lots of old oak trees was razed to make way for it. I doubt that the payment that the families received for their block and brick houses could buy them a similar-sized lot on the river anywhere in Jacksonville.

Leave it to a group of guys with a penchant for expensive toys and lots of time on their hands to reinvent the concept of fantasy baseball camps.

In its latest incarnation, the ultimate fantasy vacation replaces the balls, bats and gimpy former jocks with five of the fastest, sexiest cars on the planet and a stable of award-winning race car drivers as teachers.

This is Supercar Life, a Massachusetts-based company that allows — for fees starting at $4,990 — regular people to spend an evening hanging out socially with those drivers, followed by a full day whipping around a racetrack in about $1.5 million worth of horsepower: two apiece of the $173,000 Ferrari F430, the $170,000 Lamborghini Gallardo, the $166,000 Aston Martin DB9, the $135,000 Mercedes CLK63 AMG Black Series, and the $190,000 Porsche Turbo 997.

For four months in the winter, Supercar Life brings its toys to South Florida, where customers fly in from all over to open up the throttles on the Homestead-Miami Speedway.

Read the rest at the  Miami Herald.

(Grin.)  Race car tracks are fun, but if I had my druthers, I druther take one of those cars on a lil’ drive across Texas.   Hitting a deer in one of those lil’ thangs would surely ruin your day, though. 

I wonder if there is something deeply lacking in my psyche that doesn’t make me crave a vehicle that screams “look at me!  I’m important!”

I like vehicles that reliably get me from point “A” to point “B” while hauling the materials or people that I need to have moved and that won’t disappear in a parking lot and be in a container to South America before I can even finish shopping. 

‘Course, this is rationalizing coming from a woman who was one point away from losing her license a few years back for excessive speeding tickets.   And that was in a truck!