FORT SMITH — Shippers and port-authority executives have talked for years about deepening the Arkansas River channel from 9 feet to 12 feet to move goods more cheaply down what’s known as the “liquid highway.”

Now, a coalition of Fort Smith and Northwest Arkansas area business, civic and elected leaders has started a joint effort behind the idea in a bid to boost the economy across Arkansas and into Oklahoma.

“There’s a big interest in it,” said Paul Harvel, chief executive and president of the Fort Smith Regional Chamber of Commerce, speaking Friday to more than 200 at a chamber breakfast. “We all have come together and are singing the same tune.”

“It’s going to drive the cost down for every business, all the way up and down the corridor,” said Fayetteville Mayor Lioneld Jordan, who wasn’t present but spoke in a telephone interview afterward. “That should make this region more attractive to businesses. It should save on the costs to consumers. There’s a lot of excitement about this project. Everybody is hooking up on this.”

Jordan and Fort Smith Mayor Sandy Sanders have been gathering information in joint meetings for months. Working with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Institute for Economic Advancement, they are trying to compile the best data on how much work the project might require, as well as its costs and benefits.

“For years, we’ve heard this, we’ve heard that about what it would take,” said Sanders, who attended Friday’s breakfast. “We’re working to determine what are the facts.”

To deepen the entire Arkansas River channel would cost an estimated $180 million, an amount public officials say is daunting. The mayors are exploring public-private or state federal partnerships to fund the project, Sanders said.

On Friday, the Fort Smith Regional Council, a new group of 23 CEOs from manufacturing companies, trucking firms, hospitals, banks, utilities and others, joined efforts toward the 12-foot river channel. The council’s chairman, Sam Sicard, president and CEO of First National Bank in Fort Smith, announced that the council has decided to make deepening the channel one of its top priorities, along with higher education.

In Friday’s presentation, Harvel told the group that a 12-foot river channel would allow barges to add 47 percent more payload at little additional cost, resulting in savings.

Barge shipping is about 88 percent cheaper than shipping by truck, he said. By comparison, for each $100 spent on truck transportation, costs to transport the same shipment are $37 by rail and $12 by barge.

“The benefits are not just more capacity for barges, but also elimination of greenhouse gases” by using fewer trucks for long hauls, Sanders said. Trucks would still be needed to transport goods from ports to their destinations, he said.

Arkansas’ stretch of the Arkansas River, home to private and public ports, is part of the 445-mile McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System that, in 1970, opened the river to navigation from the Port of Catoosa near Tulsa to the Mississippi River.

Much of the Arkansas River channel is already at least 12 feet deep, experts say, but choke points exist that would have to be dredged or cleared.

Mat Pitsch, who heads a western Arkansas regional transportation group, said supporters are focusing on the idea of sequencing the project, completing and paying for segments the same way highways are often built.

“You pay for the first phase, you pay for another and keep going on,” said Pitsch, executive director of the western Arkansas Regional Intermodal Transportation Authority.

Pitsch’s group is working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build a still-water harbor in the Fort Smith-Van Buren area. The ports, called slack water harbors, are constructed off main channels, protected from currents and make loading easy and predictable in all types of weather.

In March, about 80 public officials and private business leaders from Arkansas and Oklahoma gathered in Fort Smith to develop strategies to lobby Congress, the Corps of Engineers and others to deepen the Arkansas River channel.

Business, Pages 29 on 11/03/2012