Community Corner

Schroder: The Marina Has About A Year Left

The boat harbor needs dredging and repair, and state loans for that work are very slow in coming.

The days of the Martinez Marina are growing shorter, and may be coming, finally, to an end, according to one of its biggest supporters – Mayor Rob Schroder.

Let's be clear: when I say the marina, I do not mean Shoreline Park or the waterfront park areas. This is strictly regarding the dock area where boats have been bobbing gently in the water since the early 1960s.

Schroder said last week that the marina has about a year left before it goes under, if the state continues to delay releasing both approved and requested loans for the facility. The money is desperately needed to repair the eastern wall that is supposed to prevent river silt from seeping into the harbor, making navigation all but impossible, especially at low tide.

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“We’ve got about a year,” Schroder said. “If there have been no improvements made by then, we may have to close the marina.”

“We’re losing about two feet of depth a year,” Schroder said. “Right now, we’re at about four feet at low tide.”

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The state Department of Boating and Waterways, the agency in charge of the purse strings when it comes to marina loans, was, until last year, a very understanding and flexible agency when it came to loaning cities like Martinez money. But the state budget disaster has changed those rules – DBAW is now under the rather stringent thumb of the Department of Finance, which has imposed far stricter loan requirements.

This has resulted in a delay for a $3.5 million DBAW loan, already approved but held back while the state reviews the city’s plans to repay the loan through anticipated marina revenues. The city hopes to have the loan approved by October, so that it can begin desperately needed dredging, but there is no guarantee that that will happen.

The city has come under fire for years from both critics and, in 2000, the Contra Costa County Grand Jury, which criticized the city’s lack of transparency in handling the marina loans. The city insists it can account for all the money it has received from the state.

But the original loan from 1963 is still outstanding, and several million in other loans have yet to be repaid. The city’s rather relaxed track record of repayment for the outstanding loans is not helping its case for the current loan requests, particularly under the harsh glare of the Department of Fiinance.

So mud continues to seep in through the broken eastern wall, and boaters continue to wait for high tide so they can enter and leave the facility they pay to use. Meanwhile, there is no gas pump, no restaurant, and very few services. And the docks themselves could use some repair. It’s not a modern marina facility by any standard.

The sad part is that the marina is so close to downtown – it is a great venue for people who own boats to discover our city and the many things it has to offer.

All the city can do at this point is wait, and hope, that the state will loan it the money it desperately needs to dredge the harbor and plug the holes in the eastern wall.

While it may be tempting to look for bad guys in all of this, there really aren’t any. Everyone began this journey with the best of intentions. But, like a marriage, the idea of a marina and the day-to-day reality of running one are two different kettle of fish. No one has crept off into the night with bags full of money. No one wanted to see the marina deteriorate or become impossible to navigate at low tide. It is certain that mistakes were made along the way; that is part of what happens when humans are in charge of anything.

But the marina, should it finally wind up closing, will instead be the victim of a perfect storm of a devastated state economy, the resulting fallout to the city, and the fact that city leaders could not – and perhaps should not – focus the kind of attention and energy on the marina that it obviously requires. There are many things the city must do every day: park maintenance, road repair, police response, water quality and delivery, permits and inspections, recreational activities and many other things. All of that takes resources – money, yes, but also time and energy. All of those are finite, there is only so much to go around.

Perhaps the council should ask the citizens to weigh in on this question: should the city opt to keep the marina open?

What do you think?

EVENTS:

TODAY IN HISTORY (from Wikipedia):

1741 - George Frideric Handel completes his oratorio Messiah

1752 - The British Empire adopts the Gregorian calendar, skipping eleven days (the previous day was September 2).

1814 - The poem Defence of Fort McHenry is written by Francis Scott Key. The poem is later used as the lyrics of The Star-Spangled Banner.

1959 - The Soviet probe Luna 2 crashes onto the Moon, becoming the first man-made object to reach it.

1984 - Joe Kittinger becomes the first person to fly a gas balloon alone across the Atlantic Ocean.

1994 - The Major League Baseball season is canceled because of a strike.

 


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