Friday, April 9, 2010

Beach update (Newburyport)

It appears that the $25,000 match for that DCR grant to NBPT for the nourishment project will come from the Harbormaster Enterprise Account. There's a request in to the City Council to approve transfer of the funds.

The account has $368,342 in it ... enterprise accounts are ones that support themselves through fees and rates.

The transfer is in for approval (as opposed to going to a committee). DCR (which owns the beach) will cough up $50,000 for the project.

AND it appears that another $44,750 is coming out of the account to buy a Beach Tech beach cleaning machine. Hmmm, it says in the supporting documentation for the transfer that the quote was only good until March 31 ...

An additional $15,000 for engineering and design costs for the nourishment project are in for transfer out of the city's Free Cash account.

2 comments:

Dick Monahan said...

DCR owns the beach. Newburyport residents get the same access, at the same parking fee, as anyone else that drives up. But, we have to buy a $45M gizmo to clean it? Why do we want to do that?

I guess we're justifying the $40M for sand on the basis of the taxes from the houses we're going to protect. I hope we're only counting a few years of those taxes, since that's as long as the sand will be there (where a few might be one).

I have heard talk that the boat fees are too low and that the harbormaster's office does not do a good job of collecting them. If there is any truth to either of these statements, I hope we're going to improve them. Maybe that account could pay for some more improvements.

Gillian Swart said...

Dick, there was some discussion a couple of yrs. ago about mooring fees and how people/marinas were not paying up in a timely manner for group moorings.