Ocean City Boaters to Rally on Saturday in Search of Water

Boats atilt on mud flats on either side of the new Ninth Street Bridge. Lagoons unnavigable to even swimmers at low tide. A bayfront community increasingly short on bay.

These are the subjects of a open community meeting scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday (June 15) at the Eighth Street Recreation Center (800 block of Haven Avenue).

Anybody is invited to attend. Most of the 100 bayfront homeowners who attended a similar meeting in July 2011 reportedly will be there, along with many new participants and many from the Ocean City Yacht Club and Ocean City Marlin and Tuna Club.

Second Ward Councilman Antwan McClellan and At-Large Councilman Keith Hartzell are helping to facilitate the event. State Senator Jeff Van Drew (D-1st) and Ocean City Engineering Manager Roger Rinck also will attend.

Organizers hope to develop a sustainable plan to dredge regularly, and they see two big obstacles:

• Lack of a site to dump dredge spoils. The spoils site in the marshes near 34th Street is almost full. A new site near the Route 52 causeway has a very limited capacity. And the group says only 100,000 cubic yards of the 300,000 needed will have been removed by December 2013.
• The state Department of Environmental Protection currently allows dredging only between June and December — with four of those months prime boating season.

City Council in May 2012 awarded a $1.8 million contract to Hydro-Marine Construction Company of Hainesport, NJ, to dredge areas between 15th Street and 34th Street, including substantial parts of:

• Carnival Bayou Lagoon: Between 16th and 17th streets (the dredging in this area would include part of the bayfront heading toward 15th Street)
• Venetian Bayou Lagoon: Between 17th and 18th streets
• Sunny Harbor Lagoon: Between Arkansas and Walnut
• South Harbor Lagoon: Between Spruce and Tennessee
• Clubhouse/Bluefish Lagoon: Between Waterway Road and Clubhouse Drive

The contractor did not finish work by the end of the permitting window at the end of December and was scheduled to return to finish the job on June 1. But conflicting permitting windows (the state Department of Environmental Protection says work can start June 1, the federal Army Corps of Engineers says July 1) will push the start of the project back to July 1, according to Ocean City Business Administrator Mike Dattilo.

In the meantime, barely submerged pipes line the bayfront in different areas, causing a navigational hazard.

City Council last month voted to authorize the obtaining of easements to allow the dredging of Snug Harbor (between Eighth and Ninth streets on the bay). The work would be added to the existing contract for work between 15th and 34th streets. The small spoils site near the Route 52 causeway will be used.