New director faced with setting stalled Port of Baltimore back on course

When businesses ask what they can do to help, they are told, “You can come back when the channel opens,” he said. “We want to make sure that while this is catastrophic, that they understand that this is a temporary blip, this is not the long-term view of the port that we’re going to have a channel that’s always going to be closed.”

But ports operate in very competitive environments, and business often moves from port to port because of efficiencies and cost.

“We’ll evaluate all those aspects to make sure that the value proposition for Baltimore remains the same,” Daniels said. “We’re asking them to be part of the long-term rebound and growth of the port.”

And many customers have reacted favorably, he said, because Baltimore is essential to their supply chain needs.

Other East Coast ports have “stepped up” to handle diverted cargo, Daniels said, but “when this is over, we want our cargo back, and we will do what’s necessary in order to be able to get that and be able to support the businesses that have lost business.”

Scott Cowan, president of the International Longshoreman’s Association Local 333, which represents many of the port’s dockworkers, said he has appreciated Daniels’ accessibility and responsiveness while longshoremen have been out of work.

“He is a friend of labor and that helps,” Cowan said Friday. “We are very lucky to have him.”

Daniels comes from a family of dockworkers, but still says he “stumbled” into port management. Both his grandfather and father worked as longshoremen at Port of Erie in New York. His father went into the Coast Guard, and later became a college football coach.

Daniels graduated from the Citadel in South Carolina and became a football coach himself at the Maine Maritime Academy, which trains students for maritime industry careers. He took a job in the commandant’s office and got to see port operations up close. He attended a masters program at the academy and was hired to lead a small port in Maine at age 26.

In an interview Friday, Daniels said the Port of Baltimore is unlikely to recover what the port administration estimates is $190 million of economic loss per day during the shutdown, but once channels reopen, he expects business to rebound.

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