Rep. Garamendi Hosts Bay Area Summit to Rebuild America's Maritime Industry
VALLEJO, CA — Congressman John Garamendi convened a maritime summit last week, pulling together military officers, labor leaders, educators, and elected officials from the local level up through Washington to talk through what it will take to rebuild the Bay Area’s maritime industry.
Garamendi’s message was blunt: this isn’t really about any single ship or carrier. “Rebuilding the maritime industry is a national and economic security requirement,” he said. “This isn’t just about a new battleship or aircraft carrier, it’s about our country’s ability to build, maintain and crew the maritime capabilities our country relies on. The Bay Area is the epicenter of the American maritime industry’s future. It will be here because there is no place on the West Coast of this great nation that has the potential and the assets already in place for that future.”
The event opened with a moment that had nothing to do with policy. Garamendi presented honors to Zion Jerge, a senior cadet at Cal Poly Maritime Academy, who pulled a father and son from an apartment pool in Foster City earlier this year.
From there the summit moved into two keynote addresses, from MARAD Administrator Stephen Carmel and Cal Poly Maritime President Jeff Armstrong, followed by four panels running through the day: building a resilient and competitive US maritime future, unlocking industrial capacity across Northern California, growing the maritime workforce, and coordinating regional strategy at the local and state level.
The panelist list read like a who’s-who of Bay Area maritime interests. Port of Richmond Director Charles Gerard and Vallejo Mayor Andrea Sorce represented the port and city governments most directly tied to shipbuilding infrastructure. State Assemblymember Lori D. Wilson and State Senator Tim Grayson brought the Sacramento perspective, while Libby Schaaf of the Bay Area Council spoke for the regional business community. Carmel and Armstrong stayed on for the panel discussions as well.
The workforce panel is worth watching closely. Shipyards up and down the West Coast have spent years warning that the pipeline of welders, machinists, and marine engineers hasn’t kept pace with demand, even as federal attention to naval readiness and merchant marine capacity has grown. Cal Poly Maritime’s role in the summit, both through Armstrong’s keynote and the cadet honored on stage, points to where a chunk of that pipeline is expected to come from.
Garamendi represents California’s 8th District, which includes Vallejo and much of Solano County, a stretch of the Bay Area with a long shipbuilding history. This summit is his latest attempt to turn that history into a workable industrial policy going forward.