The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Boat launch delays
‘This mess and debacle has really hurt a lot of people’
BRANFORD » Upgrades to the Branford River State Boat Launch were only supposed to take four months. Now, closing in on a year and $1.5 million in federal and state funding since the boat ramp closure, there is still a crane and barge on the river where residents’ boats should be loading in.
And, much to the dismay of locals, there is still no set date for when the launch will re-open.
“We’re reluctant to say how long this is going to take,” Eric Ott, the director of the engineering and support services division at the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection,
said this week. “We’ve done hundreds of boat launch projects. Never has it been as complicated as this.”
The DEEP boating division receives complaints almost daily regarding the launch closure, said Dennis Schain, communications director of the DEEP.
“Our focus has been getting it so it can be used,” Schain said.
The initial renovations on the Branford River State Boat Launch, which allow for two boats to be launched at once with a floating dock in the middle, were completed relatively on the four-month planned schedule, after the ramp was closed last July 2016, Ott said. Renovations began in the summer of last year due to permitting timelines and needing four months of good weather to complete the project, he said.
“We were forced to take some of the (boating) season,” Ott said. “There’s never a good time.”
But, in the fall, during the final stages of the work, inspectors noticed that the base of the launch had moved due to settling in the soils underneath the launch where it was anchored.
According to a report completed by Triton Environmental, Inc. about the damage, the interlocking blocks at the base of the ramp separated from the concrete ramp panels by approximately two feet. This would be a safety risk for boaters as their trailers would likely get stuck at low tide and unable to get back out, Ott said.
Even though the soil tests prior to the renovations showed that the soil would not be ideal for the project, Ott said, the engineers and designers decided to proceed with the initial project anyway. They had not expected the soils to be quite as bad, he said. Ott said it is now believed that the weak soils contributed to the movement and separation at the base of the ramp.
The settling of the soil and movement of the ramp has forced the price tag of the project up from $1.2 million to $1.5 million and counting and the timeline to extend much longer than the initial 120 days of construction.
“I think it just came down to the soils weren’t as we planned,” Ott said.
Local boaters say left out to dry
Mark Cisto, an entrepreneur boat captain who runs his own sailing tour company, said that when the boat launch closed last year, his sailboat was already in the water and he had to make arrangements to get it out at the end of the season down in New Haven, costing his small business more money than he planned on spending.
“Here I am doing these lovely tours of the Branford River, and there’s this unsightly mess,” Cisto said. “This was very poor planning by the powers that be.”
Cisto owns and operates Summer Wind Charters, a business he said that has continued to grow every season since it began four years ago. But, the closure of the boat launch is causing problems.
This year, he launched his sailboat on May 9 using help from a friend who has access to a yacht club after it became clear that the Branford State Boat Launch would not be opened for the start of the summer season, he said.
Now that it’s after the Fourth of July, he said recreational boaters who rely on the ramp have lost most of their time to get in the water. He said the boat ramp closure affects the local people who like to fish or boat on their own but can’t afford memberships at yacht clubs or to launch their boats in private marinas.
“Summer in Connecticut is very short and it’s just frustrating,” Cisto said. “This mess and debacle has really hurt a lot of people.”
The Branford State Boat Launch, when operational, is free and a good alternative to the next closest state operated launch in Guilford on the East River. It’s also one of the reasons why Donald Snyder moved from Orange to Branford.
Snyder, an avid fly fisherman who lives close to the Branford State Boat Launch, said that he’s been encouraged to use to the Guilford ramp for his small fishing boat, but the distance and limited parking spaces make it challenging.
“It’s a long ride,” Snyder said. “If you don’t get there first thing you can’t get in.”
Snyder said he usually has his boat out by early April on mornings he wants to fish. He said easy access to the boat ramp were a factor in his decision to move to Branford from Orange.
“There’s a lot of us,” he said. “(The ramp) needed to be repaired, but I don’t understand.”
Renovations for the renovations
Triton Environmental Inc. continued to observe the settling of the ramp for another six months, according to records obtained from the DEEP. Ott said this was done to ensure that the ramp was in a stable position before renovations were made to the newly renovated ramp.
Workers are now installing 11 steel beams that will help anchor the new ramp to much deeper soil to prevent further settling problems, Ott said.
Some of the cost of these panels and further design work on the project is being pulled from the state transportation fund, according to Dennis Thibodeau, chief of fiscal administrative services for the DEEP. More than $240,000 is being taken from the transportation fund to finish off this project, but he said given the scope of the project, the price tag is really not that high.
“We went not with the cheapest fix but the one that’s going to have a long life,” Thibodeau said.
“This has to be a 50year boat launch,” he said. “We want to do this right.”
On the whole, the project has been mostly federally funded through grant money from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Thibodeau said. The grant money from the federal government has totaled $985,089 according to Thibodeau. State bonded funds totaled $297,000, he said.
And while the end point is still unclear, the process of renovating this boat launch has been a long one.
The initial designs for the renovations for the Branford State Boat Launch were submitted by Trition Environmental in May 2014, according to the DEEP. For the next several months, the design was changed and adjusted and bids for the project were not even received from construction companies until November 2015.
But, the project had to be bid out twice as the bids came in higher than anticipated Thibodeau said, and some aspects of the project were abandoned, including re-doing the parking lot.
The new bids were not received until May 2016 and work began in July of that year.
“The site turned out to be more difficult to design,” Eleanor Mariani, state boating law administrator for the DEEP, said. “We knew there was going to be settling.”
“We’ll guarantee that this ramp will be state of the art and last 25 years,” she said.