Market Demand for and Impacts of Queensgate Terminals
Prepared for:
Queensgate Terminals, LLC 
In 2007, court-ordered lease negotiations ended between the City of Cincinnati and the developer wishing to create a working waterfront known as Queensgate Terminals. City Council later began to look into the feasibility of developing the property into a park or housing. In 2009, Queensgate Terminal wanted to communicate the economic development value of its proposed container port, and hired the Economics Center to analyze the economic impact of such a commercial enterprise on the region.
The report stated that there is a growing demand for the kinds of goods and commodities that are appropriate for container shipping. Large infrastructure investments are currently being made nationally and internationally to accommodate even greater flow of goods in containers. In fact, national transportation policy – seeking to address projections of rail and highway congestion and gridlock within the next 20 years from the increasing shipments of freight – seeks to move more freight to the nation’s river ways.
Cincinnati is uniquely positioned to take advantage of these trends. Its location today makes the port of Cincinnati the fifth largest inland port in the Country. At present, there are no port facilities in Cincinnati along the Ohio River that are equipped to handle containers, which necessarily means that containers moving into and out of the region must be carried via truck and rail. The proposed Queensgate facility would be the first terminal equipped to provide the infrastructure to transport containers through the Greater Cincinnati Region, and beyond.
Designed and developed as a “green” port, the operation could offer additional environmental benefits to the City including:
- a reduction of truck traffic
- easing of vehicle congestion
- a reduction in fuel consumption and emissions
The research indicates there is a large and expanding market for the facility proposed to be built at the Queensgate site. Once built, it will have a positive economic impact on the Greater Cincinnati region – in terms of both dollars and new jobs. Over its first five years of operations, the data projects a direct economic impact of its operations of $48 million. The analysis indicates that the total economic impact, a combination of direct, indirect and induced effects, to the Greater Cincinnati area of the first five years of operation includes:
- the creation of $105 million in total economic activity.
- nearly $25 million in total household earnings
- about a total 140 new jobs
- about a total $7 million in tariff revenues for the City
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