The Galveston County Daily News

People who care about Galveston’s economic health should tune into the fight about ship pilot pay and practices; there may be more at stake than meets the eye.

On the surface, two issues are at hand.

One is a bid by the Galveston-Texas City Pilots Association to raise rates.

The 15-member pilots’ association, which has a state-sanctioned monopoly on the business of steering ships into and out of ports, has been seeking a rate hike for several years.

The pilots claim to be underpaid. They don’t like to talk about their incomes, but there’s evidence each makes more than $300,000 a year.

The pilots argue that number fails to take into account overhead.

It would be helpful if the pilots disclosed their take-home income. Then we could all see whether they are indeed underpaid or trying to fatten an already fat bottom line at a time when a lot of other hardworking people are having to get by on less.

The other surface issue is an association policy demanding two pilots on cruise ships going in and out of the port of Galveston.

Carnival Cruise Lines and Royal Caribbean Cruises, both operating from the port of Galveston, have taken legal action in an attempt to enforce an agreement with the association.

The lines agreed to drop opposition to a 5 percent rate increase because the pilots agreed to drop the two-pilot rule. The pilots later withdrew that rate increase, filed a new one and rescinded the one-pilot agreement.

The cruise lines claim that, when the actual numbers for the rate increase were presented to the Board of Pilot Commissioners for approval, the 5 percent hike had become a 9 percent increase.

The pilots like to cast the argument in terms of safety. It’s pretty much this simple: Unless the people forced by law to use our services give us what we want, safety will be compromised. But, if safety were the issue, why would the association trade the two-pilot rule away for a pay raise?

Apparently, one pilot takes an oil tanker up the notoriously tricky Houston Ship Channel and into the port of Houston, or takes a cruise liner up the Mississippi River into the port of New Orleans, but it takes two to navigate the Galveston channel. Why is that?

Port of Galveston officials recently warned the pilot association’s actions could cost the port the cruise ship business it has worked years to build.

For the past couple of years, we’ve been hearing grumbling from other port tenants about the cost and general difficulty in working with the local pilots. Nobody wants to say it out loud. The stated fear is angering a group that can keep a ship or an oil rig riding anchor with the meter running.

The general sense is that people paying the freight can’t count on getting a fair deal or a fair hearing of a dispute.

All that will sound sort of familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the port’s decline. There are many reasons the port has fallen from its prime. Among them, the story goes, is that it got very difficult to deal with groups working at the port. Customers began to feel exploited and generally jerked around. It got to the point that burning the extra fuel to get to Port of Houston began to make sense.

We ought to make sure that’s not what’s happening now.