City sets boaters' roundtable to talk Black River Canal, other maritime concerns
The city of Port Huron is hosting a roundtable talk on Wednesday for local boaters looking to learn more about maritime issues, particularly ongoing issues addressing the closed Black River Canal.
City Manager James Freed announced the event last week, setting it for 7 p.m. at Casey’s on the Plaza, the bar in McMorran Place.
Although the canal and long-term replacement of its Tainter gate was expected to be a main topic of discussion, Freed said other things like sonar dredging for the canal or the city’s recent taking back of operations of the James C. Acheson Marina, formerly named for River Street, from Acheson Ventures’ Desmond Marine were examples of other topics they could touch on.
“There’s a lot of interest in the Black River Canal from the boating community,” Freed said on Wednesday. “A lot of misinformation’s been (posted) on social media. We want to help provide an opportunity for people to ask questions and understand the process, and then, understand where we’re at in the process.”
The city manager provided a similar update at Thursday’s City Council meeting, emphasizing the roundtable is a public event but specifically an invitation to boaters. The city’s harbormaster and city engineers are expected to attend.
“This is for people who boat the Black River, boat the canal. This is for the boating community,” Freed told the Times Herald. “This is not a general town hall about citywide issues. It’s for the boaters.”
Floodwaters first heavily damaged the Black River Canal’s Tainter gate in late January after an unseasonably early ice jam driving down the river spurred a rare reversal in water flow in the canal back toward Lake Huron, ultimately sending a surge of debris that tore the gate from its substructure.
Soon after, city officials said the gate would likely close the water, connecting boaters from the Black River to the lake without having to go up the St. Clair River instead, for this year’s season.
As of earlier this month, no timeline had been formally set to begin implementing solutions to replace the damaged gate while the city worked through the permitting process with the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy.
In a news release last Tuesday, the city updated boaters on its state permit status, confirming and clarifying online chatter over why an application hadn’t been submitted.
EGLE reportedly requires a joint permit application, or JPA, for long-term Tainter gate repairs and armoring the canal’s eroding shoreline, as well as the installation of a cofferdam in the interim.
The city cited the project’s unique circumstances in leading officials to seek out more specific details on what documentation was required for its application.
“Confirming the requirements resulted in several meetings with different representatives from EGLE, which transpired over several weeks,” the city said in its May 21 release. “The alternative would have been to submit the JPA without consulting with EGLE and risk the permit being put on hold due to administrative incompleteness, which would have required permit revisions (additional consultant fees and time), additional permit review time, and likely would have led to the same conversations that have been transpiring over the last several weeks.
“At this point the city of Port Huron is waiting for information from (the) Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which will be used to analyze the hydraulics of the Black River Canal with both the short-term and long-term plans in place to confirm that there will be no adverse effects of upstream properties during storm events. A permit application cannot be submitted until this information has been received and analyzed.”
For more information on city facilities, visit www.porthuron.org.
Contact Jackie Smith at (810) 989-6270 or jssmith@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Port Huron Times Herald: City hosting boaters' roundtable to talk Black River Canal, more
