Harbor dredging could cost Newport $18M

How to get the ever-more-shallow Newport harbor dredged has become an $18-million question for Newport Beach officials.

The harbor hasn’t been thoroughly dredged in more than 70 years. With boaters’ complaints of running aground becoming more common and an estimated 900,000 cubic yards of sediment to be removed, the city wants to get a dredging project teed up as soon as possible.

Officials hope to start in 2009, but first they need to pay for the work.

City leaders will meet later this month with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for maintenance dredging of the harbor, in the hope of persuading the Corps to pay for some or all of the work. The dredging could cost the city up to $18 million over the next 20 years, according to one city estimate.

Several possible strategies are on the table, but “the one that we seem to be talking about the most is this thought that we would try to convince the federal government to dredge the [lower] bay one more time,” Newport Beach Assistant City Manager Dave Kiff said. In exchange, federal officials would give up future responsibilities for dredging, and the city would create a fund that could pay for later projects.

“It’s our lone enticement to get them to do it,” Kiff said.

The Corps is on the hook because the lower bay contains a “federal navigation channel” that it is supposed to be kept clear, Kiff said. And dredging Newport harbor has made it into federal budgets as a line item, he said, but it keeps getting zeroed out.

The problem is three-fold, said Charles Dwyer, chief of the Army Corps of Engineers’ operations branch. First, budgets are shrinking; second, it’s a recreational harbor, a lower federal priority than commercial ports; and third, Newport harbor’s sediment contains heavy metals, fertilizers and other low-grade contaminants that mean it has to be specially disposed of. “We can’t put it on the beach,” Dwyer said.

While getting the work started in 2009 is a possibility, he said, “The chances of getting that kind of coin to fully dredge the harbor in one year are slim.

“With a lot of the Corps’ money going to [Hurricane] Katrina [relief] and Iraq ... it’s a constant struggle for us to get money to dredge our recreational harbors.”

City leaders, including Council members Leslie Daigle, Donn Webb and Mayor Steve Rosansky are willing to join in that struggle. Their choices are to keep trying to get money in the federal budget for dredging, or go it alone.

“Then [the project] would have to fight with all of our other capital needs,” Kiff said.

ALICIA ROBINSON may be reached at (714) 966-4626 or at [email protected].