Mayor Jay Gillian will hold a town hall meeting 1 p.m. Saturday, June 27, at the Howard. S. Stainton Senior Center (at the Ocean City Community Center) to talk about bayside dredging.
The meeting is open to anybody interested in learning more about efforts to dredge lagoons and channels on the bay side of Ocean City that are too shallow for boat traffic or even for swimmers during many parts of the tide cycle. Marine access is a big investment for waterfront property owners and a prime attraction for visitors.
Ocean City has committed millions in funding to dredging projects, but work has been at a standstill since 2012 when the city’s only approved disposal site was filled to capacity.
“I’m beyond anger and agitation,” Gillian said at a June 12 City Council meeting of the quagmire of bureaucracy and environmental regulations that impede the restart of Ocean City’s dredging program.
“It’s an emergency situation more than ever,” he said.
Gillian promised the town meeting would address the issue “soup to nuts”: the city’s actions to date, the obstacles it faces, plans and potential costs. He will be joined by members of City Council.
Council agreed to spend $2.7 million to haul material away from the approved spoils site in the marshes near 34th Street to make room for at least some new dredging. But even that project is bogged down, Gillian said.
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He said equipment has been staged at the the site (Confined Disposal Facility No. 83) for weeks, but the contractor can’t start work until the state returns environmental tests on the material (which already required testing as it was pumped onto the site).
The plan calls for hauling of 50,000 cubic yards to Wildwood, which has agreed to accept that material to help cap a landfill. (Read more: Contractor Still Waiting to Haul Dredge Spoils to Wildwood.)
Bids are out for a contractor to dredge lagoons between Eighth and Ninth streets (Snug Harbor) and between 16th and 17th streets (Carnival Bayou). The Snug Harbor project would use a separate spoils site under the Ninth Street Bridge.
Gillian’s administration has estimated that the city would have to dredge about 300,000 cubic yards of material to complete an Ocean City project “from tip to tip.”
In a 2012 project that was never completed because the disposal site filled up, Hydro-Marine Construction removed 73,000 cubic yards of dredged material under a $1,829,655 contract that called for the dredging of 106,000 cubic yards between 15th and 34th streets.
A separate spoils site near the Ninth Street Bridge is approved, but for an amount (4,000 to 6,000 cubic yards) far less than what Ocean City had anticipated.
City Council has approved $5 million ($4.75 million of it to be borrowed) in spending for dredging this year.
