What's the Delay with Manistee's New Marina?
Thousands of boaters head to northern Michigan in the summertime and Manistee is a popular spot.
A viewer wanted to know why, right in the middle of the busy summer boating season, did work on a new city marina project suddenly come to a screeching halt.
The answers we found for him are the subject of tonight's Fact Finder Report.
The Manistee River is a nautical expressway to the Victorian Port City and for more than three decades boaters would stop at this marina until recently.
Manistee Community Development Director Jon Rose says, "It was starting to fall apart."
So in 2006 work began on a new municipal marina. Planners were able to cover the more than $825,000 price tag with DNRE grants, DDA and marina funds, and did not have to tap into the city's general fund.
Rose says, "It provides a whole bunch of amenities for marina use we didn't have before, bigger meeting room, nicer showers, nicer toilets, meeting room upstairs."
Crews broke ground in June, but stopped shortly after when they started to dig a little deeper.
Rose says, "They found a little bit of everything, they found old logs, found stones, but most especially they found unmarked telephone lines, unmarked water lines, each of those lead to redesigns and delays."
But that's not all, most recently crews found a storm sewer line that would run right through the building.
Rose says, "no one knew any of these things were there in fact, the old city plans show the storm sewer as being elsewhere so the engineers reviewed the plans and assumed they were correct so the building was designed and based on those old plans."
Now planners have to re-route the storm sewer. Not only will that take more time, but it will also take an extra $60,000, which Rose says will come from the water and sewer funds, not the general fund.
He says, at this point, that's just another wrinkle in a bigger headache.
It's frustrating especially just having a hole in the ground for what's become 2 1/2 months that as far as the public is concerned is no progress."
Rose says now they are just trying to fix the problems, and look toward the future instead of looking back.
He says, "I'd love to find somebody to blame, it'd make my job a lot easier, but I can't. These are simply a series of unpredictable events that unfortunately all happened at the same time. I'm hoping by the end of fall we'll have a nice building here and be ready to open it for boaters next year."
I checked in with Rose again and now it looks like the contractor will be back on site next week. So what's the latest delay? 8-10 days to make new manhole structures. So what do you think about this? Leave your comments below.
