March 28, 2024
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Survey data muddy waters in Ellsworth

ELLSWORTH – A meeting Monday did not clear up confusion about the city’s harbor dredging project but it did help city officials come up with a plan on how to get to the bottom of the matter.

The city recently has received conflicting information about how much of the city harbor has been dredged. Northeast Marine Construction and Towing of Penobscot, the contractor dredging the city’s 7.5-acre harbor, has estimated that the project is about 50 percent complete. Ellsworth Harbor Master Randy Heckman has estimated the project is between 20 percent and 25 percent complete.

Surveys recently completed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and by Bangor surveyors Plisga & Day each estimate that about 30 percent of the harbor’s has been dredged.

The boundaries for each survey, however, do not appear to match up. Also, because each surveyor used a different method for gauging the depth of the harbor, some measurements in one survey differ from corresponding measurements in the other, according to the surveyors.

Shawn Mahaney of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Stan Plisga of Plisga & Day agreed at the meeting to combine their data in order to give city officials as complete a picture as possible on the current depth of the overall harbor area. Each estimated that it would take several weeks to be able to combine their data and present it to city officials.

City officials said after the meeting that they hope to be able to meet again in early September to go over the combined data and to discuss the money the city has paid so far to Northeast Marine.

According to Heckman, the city has paid the dredging contractor $332,000 of the $480,000 it has allocated for the entire project.

No representative of Northeast Marine was at Monday’s meeting. Northeast Marine, which claims Heckman has made knowingly false statements about the project to a local weekly newspaper and to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, filed a defamation lawsuit in April against Heckman in Hancock County Superior Court.

Jim Bergin, chairman of Ellsworth’s harbor commission, said after Monday’s meeting that it is unlikely the city will be able to get the entire harbor dredged for $480,000.

Stan Plisga told city officials he tried unsuccessfully to get the exact coordinates of the harbor boundary from the city’s engineering firm, Woodard & Curran of Bangor, before he first conducted a dredging survey of the harbor.

“I asked several times for that data and never got it,” Plisga said. Plisga calculated, by his estimate of where the harbor boundary lies in relation to the area that has been dredged, that 37 percent of the harbor has been dredged.

Mahaney estimated that a smaller percentage of the harbor has been dredged.

“Thirty percent is a good estimate,” Mahaney said. “Maybe lower.”

Another factor that has complicated estimates of how much of the harbor has been dredged is that as compacted material is dredged from the river, it expands and takes up more space in the contractor’s scow than it did on the bottom, according to officials.

Plisga estimated that 9,662 cubic yards of material has been dredged from the river, but Bergin said Monday that the city’s dredging coordinator, Tom Leavitt, has estimated that 16,000 cubic yards have been dredged.

The figure that determines how much the contractor is paid is not how many yards of expanded material are towed to the ocean dumping site, but how many compacted yards are removed from the bottom, according to Bergin.

The harbor-dredging project started in December 2001. Federal law prohibits dredging in salmon spawning grounds, including the Union River, between April 15 and Nov. 1.

Correction: An article published in Tuesday’s coastal edition about the dredging of Ellsworth’s harbor misquoted Ellsworth Harbor Master Randy Heckman. The city has spent $332,000 on the dredging project, as was reported in the article, but not all of that money has been paid to dredging contractor Northeast Marine Construction and Towing of Penobscot.

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