Waterfront expert recommends moving Ellis Harbor across river

A waterfront-design firm says the best long-term option for Ellis Harbor is to move the community comprised primarily of boat houses not boats to a cove on the other side of the Cedar River and to dismantle the existing harbor and return the riverbank there at Ellis Park to its natural state.

The recommendation from Edgewater Resources LLC, St. Joseph, Mich., though, was quickly dismissed on Thursday by Tom Furnish Jr., chairman of the city's River Recreation Commission and a longtime harbor tenant, as too costly and so not practical.

Instead, Furnish, who is one of the leading voices for the community of 130 or so boat house owners, said he favored a shorter-term option that would maintain the harbor status quo while incrementally making repairs to the existing harbor over time.

In his presentation to the commission on Thursday, Greg Weykamp, principal and president of Edgewater Resources, incorporated an Option A1 to his list of seven other options for the harbor, which is the option that Furnish liked and which was put together with input from the harbor tenants.

Sven Leff, the city's recreation superintendent, told the commission that he did not expect the City Council to launch into decision that would quickly alter the status quo in the harbor, and council member Chuck Wieneke, who attended Thursday's commission meeting, said pointedly, “There's no way we're going to get $5.8-million” for the harbor.

The $5.8-million figure is the cost to move the Ellis house boat community across the river, with other options to repair or alter the harbor in place costing up to $10 million, according the Edgewater report.

The firm put the cost of repairing the harbor as is at $4.75 million, but the firm called such a fix a shorter-term one that might serve the harbor for only 10 or 20 years.

Furnish said it was “better to try to repair what we got.” He said Edgewater's Option A1 was “something we can do now.”

Much of the infrastructure in the existing harbor is obsolete and failing, including most of the sheet pile walls put in place to create the harbor, the Edgewater report notes.

The sheet pile walls were not designed to hold the loads from the boat houses anchored to them and “over time the walls have begun to deform and separate from the sidewalk,” the report states.

Edgewater's recommendation to move the community to a cove across the river from the existing Ellis Harbor would feature an arrangement with much less need for sheet pile walls and would have the houses tied to a system of floating piers.

Rob Wagner, a city parks supervisor, said Thursday that the Edgewater report is of value even if its recommendations are not quickly implemented because of cost. The report, Wagner said, identifies the true costs to the city of operating the harbor and he said the report calls for the city to build those costs plus reserves for future repairs into annual rates for boat houses and boats.

In the current year, most boat house owners pay $380 a year for a spot in the harbor, a rate proposed to go up to $393 next year.

The Edgewater report states that the rate should be between $500 and $550 a year in the existing harbor just to cover the city's annual operating costs.

The annual rate for boat houses would need to climb to $2,421 to pay for the capital costs and annual maintenance if the harbor were to move across the river to the cove, the report estimates. The rate would be even more under some other options.

Edgewater's Weykamp said he understood that such a rate hike was “a big deal” and “potentially unacceptable.”

The Edgewater report notes that there is strong demand for boat houses in the harbor, but less demand for spaces to simply dock house boats or pontoon boats. The cove would provide space for more than the 130 or so spaces for boat houses in the existing harbor, the report notes.