Will the region's real 'port authority' please stand up?

When it comes to entities with a stake in the Delaware River, it's an alphabet soup, and confusing as to which does what.

While controversy is swirling around the Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA) over perks and spending, another port authority, headed by the same chairman, has the mission of running ports and attracting maritime commerce - the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority (PRPA).

DRPA. PRPA. Add in a DRBA, and an SJPC, and it's enough to bedevil a bureaucrat.

The DRPA is a transportation agency that collects tolls and runs the Ben Franklin, Walt Whitman, Commodore Barry, and Betsy Ross Bridges and the PATCO High-Speed Line. The word port is a misnomer.

Although the two agencies have the same chairman, John Estey, appointed by Gov. Rendell, they do completely different things.

The PRPA maintains and leases port facilities and works with tenants to market the port - like the recent deal to bring 150,000 imported Hyundai and Kia cars through the Philadelphia port annually.

"The similarities are in name only - port authority," said Dennis Rochford, president of the Maritime Exchange for the Delaware River and Bay, a chamber of commerce for the river. "You might conclude they do a lot of the same things. They don't. It's apples and oranges."

The DRPA has a $300 million budget and 900 employees. The PRPA's current fiscal budget is $13.8 million (including $3.1 million left over from an insurance settlement).

The PRPA, which until 1989 was called the Philadelphia Port Corp. and run by the city, has 95 employees that include an engineering and operations staff and 20 workers who maintain warehouses, fences, docks on piers, and terminals between South Philadelphia and Port Richmond.

The DRPA takes in money from bridge tolls and has spent freely on economic development unrelated to transportation, including the Kimmel Center and Camden waterfront and the beautifying of Admiral Wilson Boulevard before the 2000 Republican National Convention.

The PRPA relies on an annual state operating appropriation (which has been cut in recent years), lease revenue, grants, and capital funds for port development. The PRPA owns and leases port facilities, and markets the port internationally to try to attract steamship lines.

The PRPA is responsible for maintenance dredging along terminal berths and warehouses. It owns 2 marine terminals, 12 piers, and 8 land parcels, including the new Food Distribution Center at 6700 Essington Ave.

"There are so many entities on the river that it becomes confusing at times for foreign exporters and importers to determine who does what, who has jurisdiction over what," said John Martin, a national port consultant based in Lancaster.

"You have the DRPA, the PRPA, and the DRBA," Martin said. "We used to call it the alphabet-soup game." The Delaware River and Bay Authority (DRBA) runs the Delaware Memorial Bridge, Cape May-Lewes (Del.) Ferry, and other entities.

The DRPA is a bistate agency, beholden to political powers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The two states often don't see eye to eye. The New Jersey governor can veto any action by the DRPA board within 10 days - a power the Pennsylvania governor does not have.

Historically, the DRPA chairman is from Pennsylvania, and the DRPA chief executive officer is from New Jersey.

DRPA operates under a charter approved by legislatures in Harrisburg and Trenton and by Congress.

The PRPA was created by Pennsylvania statute and is bound to follow Pennsylvania's Sunshine Act and Right-to-Know Law.

Legislation creating the DRPA did not require the same level of public access or oversight.

"We have many eyes looking at us all the time, checks and balances," said William McLaughlin, PRPA director of governmental and public affairs. "Every single contract, every single lease has to be approved by the attorney general of Pennsylvania and the Office of Budget," McLaughlin said. "That does not happen with the DRPA."

The current flap over DRPA spending is not the first time the agency has been in the spotlight.

In the mid-2000s, the DRPA was local sponsor with the Army Corps of Engineers of deepening the Delaware River channel 5 feet, to 45 feet. Gov. Christie Todd Whitman had supported the project, but later governors were opposed, citing environmental and economic concerns.

In 2005, Rendell, who was DRPA chairman, refused to allow the DRPA board to meet for 17 months. The standoff was resolved in 2007, and Pennsylvania and the PRPA became the local sponsor.

The DRPA used to be named the Delaware River Bridge Commission, "and many of us wish it was called that again," said McLaughlin, former legislative secretary to Gov. Milton Shapp and deputy city representative for Mayor Bill Green.

Twenty years ago, the DRPA had a "world trade division" that did port marketing.

In the 1990s, there was an effort to create the Port of Philadelphia-Camden, an entity that would have absorbed the PRPA and South Jersey Port Corp. (SJPC) into a "unified marketing effort," Rochford said. "That never happened."

Eventually, the DRPA abandoned most maritime activities, although it still operates a cruise terminal at the Navy Yard and a ferry between Penn's Landing and Camden.

The reason the DRPA has port in its name goes back to the history of the communities built around the port, said Paul Bingham, transportation consultant with Wilbur Smith Associates Inc., of Columbia, S.C.

"The port historically was the core, the heart, of the entire community. Philadelphia exists where it is," he said, "because William Penn had a ship land there and built up the biggest port in the colonies."

Although the DRPA might more aptly be named a bridge and rail authority, "it's because of that body of water, the Delaware, that they have a function to exist," Bingham said.

As cash-strapped Pennsylvania has slashed its own budget in recent years, so has the annual appropriation to the PRPA shrunk, from $6.5 million in 2006 and 2007 to $2.5 million this year. With a leaner budget, the PRPA has trimmed legal costs and is doing more legal work in-house.

The agency is not hiring and has banned travel, except for marketing staff on key business trips.

"No more seminars, no more trips to the American Association of Port Authorities meetings," McLaughlin said. "Travel is eliminated."

The DRPA in the last decade steered the bulk of outside legal work to Rendell's former law firm, Ballard Spahr L.L.P., where Estey is also a lawyer.

The PRPA, in contrast, paid Ballard Spahr only $350 - for one job - last year.

Ballard Spahr is defending Pennsylvania in lawsuits by New Jersey, Delaware, and environmental groups to try to stop the channel-deepening.

"We are not paying for it. The state is," said PRPA chief counsel Gregory Iannarelli. "The sole reason for Ballard Spahr was they were doing the channel-deepening advice for the governor's office for years."

Law firms that received the most PRPA legal work in the mid- and early 2000s were Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen L.L.P.; Reed Smith L.L.P.; Blank Rome L.L.P.; and Sand & Saidel P.C.

Last year, Eckert, Seamans, Cherin & Mellott L.L.C. and Cozen O'Connor garnered the bulk of PRPA legal fees.