The ongoing effort to restore the city’s shorefront vegetation to more native and less invasive species has hit a milestone, and the panel in charge of implementing a plan is looking for public input.
Four concepts have been developed for the West Haven Boardwalk Resilience and Eco-Restoration Project, the West Haven Shoreline Restoration Committee announced.
The public is invited to give feedback on the different alternatives via the project website at https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/806ffac8f509415a8278595435707de4. The deadline is Jan. 14.
Since July, the committee has been collaborating with SLR International Corp. and the West Haven community to restore a 1.5-acre area of public shoreline adjacent to Old Grove Park, with the goal of becoming a model for coastal ecosystem exploration with an educational component.
To identify opportunities and constraints associated with potential improvements, SLR has prepared four conceptual alternatives depicting nature-based coastal solutions and potential amenity space improvements. The concepts include key ideas that help define how the space can be used and what visitors will see and learn when immersed in the space.
“Ongoing community involvement is a vital component of this project,” said committee co-leads Marilyn Wilkes, the vice president of the Land Trust of West Haven, and Mark E. Paine, Jr., the director of the city Department of Parks and Recreation. “These four concepts were developed with the data we collected from the on-site community engagement event and online survey.”
“Now we are asking the public to weigh in on the four designs and let us know what elements within each concept they like or dislike,” Wilkes and Paine said. “The team will use that feedback to create the final plan.”
Once the data is analyzed from the concepts’ online survey, SLR will prepare a final Nature-Based Coastal Resilience Plan and then create a preliminary engineering plan to 30% design. The plan will show enough detail to identify temporary and permanent impacts and develop a preliminary engineer’s opinion of probable construction costs.
It will also indicate existing structures, topography, utilities, vegetation removals, and sediment and erosion controls.
The committee is expected to share the plan with the public by March.
See the concepts at https://www.cityofwesthaven.com/DocumentCenter/View/4870/Boardwalk-Eco-Restoration-Project-Concepts-PDF.