The Presque Isle Marina in Marquette, seen here, will undergo significant improvements under city plans. (Journal file photo)

MARQUETTE — The city of Marquette has applied for a Michigan Department of Natural Resources waterways grant to help fund the completion of the Presque Isle Marina project.

The Marquette City Commission voted 6-0 to approve moving forward with the grant application at last Monday night’s meeting, ahead of the Thursday’s application deadline. Mayor Jenna Smith was absent from the meeting.

Should the grant be approved, the funding would cover 50% of the total project cost, which is estimated to be $524,200. This will be Phase 3 of the project, which entails the removal of the remaining pier, replacement of the parking lot and the installation of a utilities decoupling system.

The city applied for a waterways grant in 2017 to remove the middle, southernmost pier in preparation for a new floating pier system that holds 32 boat slips able to accommodate vessels 30 to 60 feet long. The construction contract was awarded to Kokosing Industrial’s Durocher Marine Division out of downstate Cheboygan in July 2019, and total cost of the project was estimated at over $1.4 million.

According to the city’s director of community services Jon Swenson, that grant money did not address the remaining needs of the marina.

“This grant would basically finish the project,” he said. “The biggest portion of this would be the over-the-water portion to remove the last remaining concrete bin-wall pier that is at the marina. There would be no additional (boat) slips, so it would be just the slips that are existing on the new floating pier. There are no slips that we sell on the bin-wall pier that would be removed. That’s been decommissioned for safety reasons.

“This would really be to finish the project, to clean up what is out in the water, to resurface the parking lot and then to make the new pier a little bit more official. We’ve realized some growing pains as we put it in, we’ve had a little bit of damage each year and we have the opportunity, based on the way the pier was built, to decouple it and ice it in.

“The flotation package built it with extra strong stringers on the side, it’s made to be frozen in place, but because of the connection to the land and the utilities that run through that, we have the bubble it currently which uses a lot of power.

“We’ve been working with them and with Coleman (Engineering Co.) on the cost estimates of it, and in the interest of the taxpayers and ratepayers, a waterways grant is the easiest way to subsidize those funds in order to reduce that down from $500,000 to $260,000.”

If the grant is successful, the city said the money will be appropriated in October of this year and construction is expected to commence in the fall.

In other business conducted at Monday’s meeting, the commission appointed Dennis Honch to the Marquette County Solid Waste Management Authority, reappointed Callie New and Rob Beranek to the Brownfield Redevelopment Authority, reappointed Margaret Brumm to the Marquette Area Wastewater Treatment Advisory Board, and reappointed Margaret Schwalm to the Elections Board.

Redistricting Michigan and the Harbor Advisory Committee also made presentations to the commission.

Ryan Spitza can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 248. His email address is rspitza@miningjournal.net.