BARKER — Residents and officials are cautiously optimistic as the first steps are taken to develop a proposed “short sea” shipping corridor in the town of Somerset.

The Hamilton-Oshawa Port Authority (HOPA) previously said it reached an agreement with the owner of the decommissioned Somerset Generation Station to build a new Lake Ontario shipping corridor and port at the 1,800-acre site.

Members of the Somerset town board say that, overall, they would welcome the proposed port, but a lot of “legwork” still has to be done.

“Everybody else in the community knows the same amount of stuff that we know,” town supervisor Jeff Dewart said. “I haven’t talked to (the organizers) since they initially came to the town back in April. They said there’s a number of possibilities of what could go on down there.”

A multimodal shipping terminal would be created at the former location of New York’s last coal-fired electric generation plant on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. The plant was decommissioned in 2020.

HOPA said the cross-lake marine shipping corridor would create “supply chain capacity and reduce emissions associated with bi-national goods movement.”

Dewart indicated that residents he’s spoken with so far don’t appear to be opposed to the project and believe it could provide benefits for the town. The main concern that he’s been hearing from residents is the increased tractor trailer traffic that would be going to the port.

“If it does what they’re hoping it does, (bringing) 100 full time jobs, it could bring more people here for the town and kids for the school…,” Dewart said. “I got a couple of people I’ve talked to that think it’s a great idea. They’re not happy about all the trucks, but they think it’s great because it’ll bring people here and maybe some of the wives or husbands that don’t work there might decide to do a business down here.”

Town board member Jon Hotaling said that while he hopes the project comes to fruition, he will take a wait-and-see approach for the time being.

“When I first heard about it, I said, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it and I’ll never live to see it,’” Hotaling said.

Longtime Somerset resident Jim Hoffman said he also is taking a wait-and-see approach, and he has some concerns about the possible impacts of the project on the town.

“It’s going to raise a lot of environmental issues because there’s no natural port there,” Hoffman observed. “So there is going to be significant concern about what they’re doing to our lake and our lakefront. And then of course, I think everybody realizes this, if you bring a lot of traffic in here, our roads can’t handle it.”

A traffic study on the potential impact of the port on surrounding communities will be part of the development process, agents of HOPA and landowner Beowulf said previously.

The partners say that opening of the port would create hundreds of direct and indirect jobs in Niagara County and the Greater Buffalo area including stevedores, warehouse employees, freight forwarders, dockworkers, crane operators, vessel agents, dredging contractors, marine pilots, truck drivers and shipyard workers among others.

Norm Jansen, town planning board chairperson, said he’s “neutral” on the proposal at this point but he does recognize the potential benefits it could have.

“There’s going to be a lot of people hired there. For that, I’m all for it,” Jansen said.

The site, which has been undergoing redevelopment, is approximately 37 miles directly southwest of the Port of Oshawa. It is currently the location of the Lake Mariner Data facility, a high-tech campus focused on supporting various high energy use industries including bitcoin mining, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.

Also on the sprawling property, Somerset Solar LLC, a subsidiary of AES Clean Energy Development LLC, is planning to raise a 125-megawatt solar array. The company has received a draft permit from the state Office of Renewable Siting.