Retiring Port Director Tommy Hart likes to say he has spent his working life in two careers. One was as the public face of Greenville’s business community. The other, he insists with a grin, has been building and rebuilding the Port of Greenville into one of the most important river hubs in the country.
Now, after 17 years as port director, Hart is stepping down and turning over the wheel to longtime harbor operator Richard Word, who brings more than a decade of towboat and barge experience on this stretch of the Mississippi River.
Hart’s decades of port building
Hart arrived at the port in 2008 with an unusual advantage: he already knew almost every inch of it. “Everything you’d ever want to know, because I built it,” he said of his early years in industrial development, when he helped secure funding, put in infrastructure and place industry on the 100-acre riverfront tract that became the modern port.
He later helped push through a 33-acre expansion behind the port terminal when customers started asking for waterfront sites the port did not have. “We were seeing customers with a demand for waterfront sites and we didn’t have any,” he said. “So we pushed the project and got 33 more acres.”
Over time, Hart’s focus shifted from recruiting industry to rebuilding the port’s aging bones. “Everything that was at the port, infrastructure, facilities, equipment, has been totally gone away with and restored,” he said. “Forty million dollars’ worth” since 2008.
A grant writer who never missed
Much of that rebuilding came through an aggressive pursuit of grants. Hart said he has filed for 68 grants during his tenure and “I’m proud to say I was awarded 68,” a perfect batting average that even he acknowledges is “kind of unusual.”
Those dollars have gone into docks, equipment and buildings, including a half-million-dollar grant to rebuild a large warehouse leased to a steel company. “We’re going to take it down to the frame,” Hart said. “New insulation, new metal, new roof, new electrical, heating, all of the roll-up doors new. I’ve got funding already approved for that.”
One last big piece of infrastructure is still on his mind as retirement nears. Hart said he is waiting on a roughly million-dollar decision to resurface Harbor Front Road, the heavily used mile-long industrial street that serves the high-fill area in front of Farmer’s Grain. “That is the only thing I haven’t totally rebuilt,” he said, adding that the road’s 1970s base has held up remarkably well under years of overloaded truck traffic but is starting to crack.
“I’m a little reluctant to say I’m retiring because I’ve got a million dollar decision that’s about to be made that would come to Greenville,” Hart said. “I have not called them and told them I’m stepping down till that decision is made.”
A national player in tonnage
If Hart sometimes sounds impatient with red tape, it is partly because he believes Greenville has earned a seat at the table. “We’re the 11th largest tonnage port on the inland waterway system,” he said, noting that ranking is for the entire national network, not just the Mississippi River. “That gives us standing. When you go to Washington and you meet with the delegation … we’re a serious player.”
The port’s core identity remains agricultural. In recent years, Hart said, “fertilizer lately has been our big item” coming in, along with salvage grain, while outbound loads have included cottonseed, grain and other salvage material resold into river markets. Steel tonnage that once moved through Greenville dried up as manufacturing shifted overseas, but Hart said he already has another steel company interested in the site where the previous recycler operated.
Greenville’s volumes put it neck-and-neck with Vicksburg, depending on the year and what large shippers are doing, Hart said. “When the sand company was here, we jumped up to right at five million tons a year,” he said. “We park around three-seven, three-eight, four. Vicksburg will be in that same; this year they’ll be here, next year we’ll be there.”
Fighting low water and a changing river
Both Hart and Word say the greatest operational challenge has been the river itself. In recent years, record low levels have forced barges to scrape bottom in the harbor and at the mouth of Lake Ferguson, the artificial lake that holds Greenville’s harbor.
“We just, you know, literally dragged barges through the harbor,” Hart said of some low-water days, describing barges set so hard on the bottom that “it’s like a suction. It’s almost impossible to move.” Word, who has managed tug and fleeting operations along a 50-mile stretch of river, said his boats have at times been “up bottom for months” pushing in and out of the lower fleeting area.
Word credits close coordination among the port, harbor operators and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for keeping Greenville open when other harbors had to shut down. “A lot of harbors during low water did close. It just shut everything down,” he said. “Greenville never did. We kept moving.”
Word steps in with river experience
Word comes to the port commission after 11½ years in the harbor, most recently managing the local operation for a marine services company that provides tug service, barge fleeting and midstream fueling. He also worked a summer as a college deckhand in 1989, gaining early exposure to the towboat industry that would later become his career.
In Greenville, his company’s tugs have worked from Yellow Bend, about 10 miles north, down past the Greenville bridge, tending barges, responding to emergencies and handling a steady flow of inbound and outbound freight. “Really, the number one thing that we do is we provide tug service to go get barges being dropped here,” Word said. “We go get barges off of the tow as they’re going down the river and bring them into the harbor.”
Word said harbor operators and terminal staff have long worked “kind of like a family within the harbor,” each looking after their own interests while trying to be “good stewards of our neighbor’s interest.” That neighborly feel extends beyond the water, he added. “In the reality of Greenville and the surrounding counties that use our harbor, it’s our neighbors. It’s our cousins, our aunts, our uncles,” he said. “If we succeed in the harbor, then our families and our neighbors succeed in their businesses.”
Priorities: new crane, constant dredging
Hart’s rebuilding campaign will stretch into Word’s tenure with the arrival of a new $2.4 million equilibrium crane for the terminal. “We have a brand new crane coming, 2.4 million,” Hart said. “I’m disappointed it’s not already here … I’ll be back when it finally hits the deck.”
Word said getting that crane set up and lined up with customers will be among his first priorities. “There’s some projects that require a specific equipment, with a really big equilibrium crane,” he said. “That’s gonna be a priority, getting that set up and talk to customers that need that for whatever project they bring to our harbor.”
At the same time, Word said he wants to stay aggressively ahead of dredging issues at the mouth of Lake Ferguson and in the chute leading to the port terminal. Low water and silt deposition have narrowed and shallowed those areas, and a Corps project involving revetment work on the outside of Archer Island is in the works. “I would like to have a good plan and kind of year after year improve on what we’re doing,” Word said. “We can’t … just wait until the following year. We have to be proactive and stay on it.”
Balancing industry and tourism
Even as Greenville’s port remains an industrial workhorse, Word sees room to grow its role in tourism. The port now hosts Mississippi River cruise vessels, including the Viking riverboat that has begun making regular stops.
“We’re industrial, but there’s a fair amount of recreation that could happen in the future,” Word said. “We have the Viking tour, the cruise boat coming now … They love coming to Greenville. If there are things that we could do to accommodate that, I think they might, you know, we want them coming.”
Word said he plans to evaluate how the terminal’s docks, seawall and yard space might supplement what other customers can do, particularly when they lack room to load or unload specialty cargo. “We would like to use our facilities here to enhance and supplement wherever needed if there are customers that can’t get service that we could help them get service,” he said. “That’s my main priority, is see what the needs are and see what we could do to help.”
Hart’s legacy and next chapter
Looking back, Hart points to two accomplishments he considers most significant: adding land and fully renewing the port’s infrastructure. “One, I picked up 54 acres of land and 1,500 feet of waterfront area to give us an opportunity to bid other projects,” he said, referring to the old Chicago Mill site that has remained under option and ready for development. “Second, rebuilding everything at the port, re-equipping it, and expanding capacity for transloading.”
Though he bristles at the word “retiring,” Hart said he plans to spend a month in Florida watching the sun rise and set and playing golf before coming back home in February. “Our friends are here. Our social activities are here. Our church is here,” he said. “What am I gonna find anywhere else that I wouldn’t have to start from scratch?”
He also expects to keep a hand in the port’s future, especially on funding questions. “I’ll help with the grant writing,” he said. “I’ve built a little reputation in that segment of activity.” And he has no doubt about the man now stepping into the director’s role. “Richard, smarter, faster, more energy, he’ll be able to do both,” Hart said, predicting that within two to three years Word will be president of the State Ports Council.
For Hart, who once spent his days flying around the world recruiting industries and now measures success in tons of grain and fertilizer, the port has been both a career and a calling. For Word, whose tugboats kept barges moving when the river nearly shut them down, it is a responsibility he says he is ready to shoulder.
