MARQUETTE — The Marquette City Commission along with city staff members held a work session on Tuesday night to discuss Phase 2 of the Lakeshore Boulevard restoration project.

Phase 1 of the project, which involved moving a portion of the road from Pine Street to Hawley Street 300 feet inland and 4 to 6 feet higher, along with a new multiuse path, accessible parking areas and shoreline and beach stabilization work, was completed in October.

Phase 2 of the project is expected to involve additional shoreline stabilization, dune and beach restoration and an underwater habitat, but has yet to be approved by the commission.

Matthew Clark of Baird, a firm specializing in coastal engineering and restoration, was present at Tuesday’s virtual work session to provide the city with their proposed plans.

“The project need is more or less the existing conditions,” he said. “Roughly you have up to 4,000 feet of public shoreline and an 18- to 20-acre site that’s generally degraded. There’s public infrastructure at risk from coastal storm damage primarily and really no safe waterfront access. For an able-bodied person, it would require work to get over those zones to actually enjoy the waterfront.

“Our project purpose is to upgrade coastal resiliency and we want to do this in a forward-looking approach. We want to create a living shoreline, we want to protect Lakeshore Boulevard and we want to provide a public green space that has waterfront access associated with it.”

Clark walked commissioners and city staff through a series of constraints on the project, as well as work Baird conducted while assessing the project site.

“The supporting analysis we’ve done here, we started off with field data collection and things like site reconnaissance and coring and surveying and things like that,” he said. “We went into wave modeling and water (level) analysis, we got input from the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community for plant species, we’ve had EGLE (Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy) and the Corps (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) take a look at this and there’s been city input all along.

“We’ve done some sediment transport assessments and hydraulic analysis of the over-topping for our solution. We’ve also done a fair amount of coastal design and have gone on to document all of that in the drafts, drawings and specifications, and we’re working on a report and recommendations right now.”

Renderings from Baird presented at the work session included an accessible trail adjacent to the multiuse path, a natural cobble beach area and more dune grass.

Dennis Stachewicz, director of community development for the city, said the city hopes to move on the project in the coming year.

“One of the things as we move through this design is to finalize the financial numbers,” he said. “Once we have that, then we can move forward working with (chief financial officer) Gary Simpson and (city manager) Mike Angeli to program that through the Capital Improvements Plan and begin construction.”

Phase 1 of the project was an estimated $3 million to $4 million. The entire project is expected to cost upward of $10 million, according to a previous Mining Journal article.

Funding for Phase 1 was secured through grants from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the National Coastal Resilience Fund and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among others.