Boat basin damaged by tsunami to be fully rebuilt
The Crescent City Harbor’s boat basin is getting a $22.5 million dollar renovation for free.
Damage caused by a tsunami in 2006 is finally going to be repaired because the harbor received a grant of $5 million from the California Development Block Group.
The grant is needed to provide the local portion of the $22.5 million cost of replacing the inner boat basin, which was damaged in the 2006 tsunami. Three quarters of the funds are being provided by California, but to get the more than $15 million amount from the state the harbor had to come up with $5 million from another source.
“This is a great step forward for not just the harbor but Del Norte County as a whole,” said County Supervisor Gerry Hemmingsen.
Hemmingsen was one of a collection of local officials that made the trip to Sacramento to meet with CDBG’s Economic Development Advisory Committee Thursday.
“It was a great meeting,” Hemmingsen said. “They were very pleased with the project.”
Harbor master Richard Young couldn’t contain his happiness.
“This has been a long difficult process,” Young said. “That the meeting went so well is just fantastic.”
According to Young and Hemmingsen the EDAC voted unanimously to recommend that the harbor receive the CDBG funds.
“This is the largest amount of money that they can give,” Young said. “I think that it’s really a comment on how important our harbor is to California and the region that we got the most they could give.”
While the harbor doesn’t have the check in the bank — the money can’t be disbursed until the next fiscal year begins July 1 — Young said the security of knowing that it is coming allows the harbor to begin the design process.
“We didn’t want to start designing the thing until we had funds available,” Young said. “It wouldn’t have been possible to know what we could do without knowing what we had to spend.”
Now that the funds are practically guaranteed, Young said a number of things have to happen before the harbor can actually break ground.
“We have to start the final design process,” Young said. “We need to get a geo-technical survey done, we need to approve a scope of work and we need public input on the design itself.”
Young said that all those things will very likely be completed by January, at which point the harbor “will be off and running.”
“This really turned out as well as it possibly could have,” Young said. “We are getting all the docks replaced without going into any debt.”
Young wanted to stress how much local fishing related businesses helped in receiving the grant.
“This would not have been possible without all the fishing related businesses that stepped forward,” Young said. “Also the old harbor commission really got this ball rolling. Hopefully they know that this was in large part because of their efforts.”
