Former Steamship Freight Boats May Get New Lease On Life Hauling Nantucket's Recyclables Off-Island

The Steamship Authority's former freight boats may get a new lease on life and continue to serve Nantucket.

The M/V Gay Head and the M/V Katama were both sold at bargain prices last year to the Robert B. Our Co., the Harwich-based construction firm that has completed several large projects on Nantucket and is currently working on the multi-year, multi-million-dollar sewer main replacement project.

The Robert B. Our Co. has renamed the vessels the M/V Tom Nevers and the M/V Tuckernuck, and the company has proposed a new freight service between Nantucket and New Bedford called Offshore Tug & Transportation LLC. During Tuesday morning's Steamship Authority Port Council meeting, it was revealed that the town of Nantucket is supporting the proposal in the hopes that it will be able to haul the island's recyclables off-island in the old freight vessels.

"There is interest from the town of Nantucket to run this service," said Terence G. Kenneally, general counsel for the Steamship Authority. "The DPW over there on the island wants to deal with their building inventory of recyclables in particular. The idea is to load the vessel and bring it to Robert Our's facility and an offshore facility in New Bedford, where it will be offloaded and then taken to facilities on the mainland for recycling...

"The DPW on Nantucket is definitely advocating for the service," Kenneally added. 

The town currently ships the island's recyclables off-island on trucks on the Steamship Authority's existing ferries and freight boats.

Offshore Tug & Transportation would need a license from the Steamship Authority's Board of Governors to run the service and utilize Steamboat Wharf's slips for loading and unloading.

The Robert B. Our Co. already transports huge amounts of aggregate and other materials to Nantucket by barge. A license from the Steamship Authority to dock its new freight vessels at the slips on Steamboat Wharf would not only expand its operations but also potentially deepen its already substantial contractual agreements with the town.

Nantucket town manager Libby Gibson and Select Board chair Dawn Hill Holdgate did not respond to a message seeking comment on the potential arrangement with Robert B. Our Co. to launch the new transportation business.

Beyond the shipping of recyclables on the two old freight boats, Robert B. Our Co. also envisions transporting construction-related debris, wood waste, as well as the aggregate materials and equipment it is already barging to the island.

"Robert B. Our Company has successfully transported material, large equipment,
problematic and odd-shaped material, and more for various purposes to the island of
Nantucket, working in harmony with the SSA," the company wrote in a letter to the Steamship. "We are restructuring how we operate the transportation while trying to create efficiency within our company. We have decided it was time to have the transportation aspects of our company be a stand-alone company, forming Offshore Tug & Transportation."

But not everyone is convinced. Myles Reis, the owner of Reis Trucking, raised concerns about the potential deal with Robert B. Our Co. and the impacts it could have on Nantucket's smaller companies.

"If this happens, it's going to take a lot of the small haulers, landscaping companies - and I can bring up a couple of names like Valero or Burns - they'll go with a dump trailer and bring a certain amount of stuff back for an individual, a one-time shot, and I think it's going to start to hurt them," Reis said. "If it hurts them, it hurts your reservations. It's just the cost of you not getting the business...I want to see that it's a level playing field, for me as a company, but for a lot of the small haulers."

In a letter to the Steamship Authority, the Robert B. Our Co., proposed the following potential schedule for the M/V Tom Nevers and M/V Tuckernuck to operate two or three days per week:

• 6:30 a.m. arrival - 7:30 a.m. departure
• 9:30 a.m. arrival – 11:00 a.m. departure
• 3:30 p.m. arrival – 4:30 p.m. departure

"The other really big component of this is: how's it going to impact the fact that we only have two slips in Nantucket?" Kenneally, the SSA's general counsel, asked on Tuesday. "How does it squeeze into the schedule, and how can we do that? I think they did a good job of proposing three trips, two to three days a week, and they put forth some times that they apparently, they looked at the schedule, and they did a good job of that, and we have to take a look at that and try to figure out a way that we can make that work. I know Elaine (Mooney) and her team out there on Nantucket have done a great job over the years of managing the barge operations that we currently have. So there's a lot of moving parts."