Committee selects Calgary firm to study Port of Wild Horse

The Wild Horse Border Committee, comprising representatives from both the state of Montana and province of Alberta, has selected a Calgary firm to conduct a feasibility study/business plan to quantify the economic benefits of expanded hours of operation at the Port of Wild Horse.

“The Wild Horse border project has been an important and collaborative effort between the U.S. and Canada for more than a decade,” Havre Mayor Tim Solomon, co-chair of the committee, said in a press release. “We increasingly understand the interplay between a healthy economy on one side of the border and how that impacts the other side.

“By having this professionally-developed, data-driven feasibility study, it is the hope of the committee to quantify what we already anecdotally believe is the case, which is that extended hours at this port of entry by the federal governments in Canada and the U.S. will result in additional private investment and job creation on both sides of the border,” Solomon added.

The document is scheduled to be completed in the spring of 2016.

A push to expand the operation of Wild Horse, which now operates 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the summer and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the winter and requires commercial traffic to have a permit before using the port to transport goods across the border, was started early last decade with Solomon’s predecessor, Havre Mayor Bob Rice, leading the Montana side.

A study by the Bureau of Business and Economic Research of Missoula’s University of Montana released in 2008 found that even using very conservative estimates, upgrading the Port of Wildhorse north of Havre to a 24-hour commercial port would result in increased traffic and increased economic activity in north-central Montana.

The border committee, with support from Montana’s congressional delegation, has been trying to upgrade the port’s operation for years, with efforts in recent years to extend the summer hours to a longer duration or continue them year-round, such as proposing a three-year pilot program to test having year-long extended hours.

Federal officials on both sides of the border have given limited support to expanding the hours, with confusion ensuing in some years when one side would extend the hours but the other would not, then later agreeing to extend them.

In the latest development, the committee selected the Van Horne Institute of Calgary, through a competitive process, to complete the feasibility study and business plan, the press release says.

The institute will partner with PROLOG Canada, also of Calgary, on the project. The Van Horne Institute is a member-based organization that serves as a catalyst for the development of education and public policy research in the fields of transportation, logistics and regulated network industries. PROLOG Canada is a transportation and logistics consulting firm.

“We are all excited about the next phase of this project, and anticipate that the good work of the Van Horne Institute and PROLOG Canada will demonstrate the significant economic benefits of this important cross-border initiative and provide us with a roadmap that will help guide our policymakers to invest in this economic development effort,” said Celina Symmonds, a member of the City Council for Medicine Hat and co-chair of the committee. “The creation of this feasibility study and business plan is the most important step we have taken in a very long time.”

Funding for this project comes from the State of Montana’s Big Sky Economic Development Trust Fund Program; Palliser Economic Partnership of southern Alberta; the cities of Havre and Medicine Hat, Alberta, and Hill County.