CEO of SENESCO.
Name: Robert Jarvis
Position: President and Chief Executive Officer of Southeastern New
England Shipbuilding Corp. (SENESCO) in North Kingstown.
Age: 54
Rhode Island's Market Has Changed. Developers, Builders, Investors and Sellers Must Change With It.
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Background: Jarvis held the position of vice president and general
manager at SENESCO for a few years before being promoted to president and CEO
in October 2001 when former CEO Robert Homan retired. Jarvis, a native of Scotland,
recently served as vice president at Service Marine Inc. of Morgan City, La.,
where he was charged with handling new construction for the company. Before
Service Marine, Jarvis was general manager of the shipyard division of McDermott
Inc., also in Louisiana and president of Boston Graving Dock in Boston, Mass.
Education: naval architecture and business management degrees from
Strathclyde University Glasgow, Scotland 1970
Residence: Narragansett
PBN: You have been involved in shipbuilding for many years. Was this a
hobby or talent that you acquired in your native country of Scotland?
JARVIS: No, I got into shipbuilding when I saw the Queen Elizabeth
launch. Up until that point I wanted to design buildings.
With the success of the 80,000-gallon barge, the Tennessee, which your
company built for Seaboats Inc. last year, you’ve received a letter of intent
for a second, similar barge. Has that contract come to fruition?
We will be meeting with them very, very soon. I think he was planning to take a week’s vacation and go fishing. It will be happening soon. We spent a fair amount of time with them going over the good and bad of the first one, not that there was too much bad in it, but there were some enhancements that we would like to do, operational ones like ease of operation for his people.
Can you talk about the talent and time that it took to build such a massive
barge?
Just over a year, about 15 months from design and from scratch. Obviously based on the owner’s requirements. At its peak we probably had 110 people working on it at one time.
The main element is ship fitters and welders. The shipbuilders can make the welder’s job very easy. So that is the area we are pushing for – skilled shipbuilders. Unfortunately, there is a shortage of people in that particular area.
What type of employees are you looking for?
Ship builders. There has to be people who can take pieces of steel that have been cut, have to be able to read blueprints, have to be able to assemble and bend the steel into the proper shape. One of the things we need is to start is a ship-building program for kids in the area and show them they can make a good living from this as well as a good education. Typically we would start them at $10 an hour. Typically what we look at are kids that can’t afford to go to college. What I’d like to do is take one of the top shipbuilders and have him help them. If this fuel barge market continues you are looking at five and 10 years of full employment.
If those students aren’t in fact trained or if there isn’t a program in
place will this crunch continue?
It will get worse. What we’ll end up doing is call companies in Mississippi,
Alabama, Norfolk and Canada and ask them to send us trained fitters and welders.
We end up going out of state. Unfortunately, the success rate in bringing those
people on has not been great. They most certainly don’t like the cold weather.
Have you asked the state for any assistance in developing this training
program?
There have been some discussions with CCRI. We need to go a bit further on those discussions.
Would you say you have any allies in the state that are helping your company?
We have a fair amount of association with a number of people on the waterfront. There is a company called Specialty Diving. We do a lot of work for them; they do a lot of work for us. They are marine contractors. Periodically, they will have an inquiry from someone out of state and they’ll pass the name onto us and the same applies to his company if there is someone looking for boat gear we’ll pass them on to him.
Typically our customers are not from instate they are from out of state…New York, Massachusetts. What’s happening in the industry – in the ship building and certainly barge building industry – is there are companies in the South that operate barges like the one we are building but what we are finding is competition is dwindling and demand is increasing. We just completed a study looking at barges currently operating on the U.S. coastline and there was something like 105. Of the 105, as of the end of 2000, there was only 25 that were double hulled. They are waiting until the last minute because there is legislation right now on a tariff on fuel that is carried on single hulled barges.
(Locally, there was legislation introduced in the 2001 Senate session requiring “all barges entering Rhode Island waters be double-hulled.” The bill was introduced as a result of the oil barge accident in Middletown that dumped 9,000 gallons of No. 6 oil into Narragansett Bay.)
Why are they waiting so long?
Economics, economy, oil companies I guess dictate what’s paid for. There are approximately 50 to 60 of these big barges that still need to be changed.
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