As the city inches closer to an agreement with the Department of Natural Resources on an open-water marina, it is asking current liveaboard residents for feedback on the potential types of moorage they would like to see within the marina.
A pre-application, which the city released Monday and requests its return by Friday, gives residents a choice of several types of moorings at varying costs. (Scroll down for full document)
The only known dollar figure for the open-water marina is the fee for leasing the physical space, which varies between $240 and $13 monthly for a 30-foot vessel, according to city documents. The rest remains undetermined, said Harbormaster Tami Allen, because the city and DNR continue to negotiate the terms of the marina. An accurate rental cost will not be available until the city and DNR come to an agreement, she said.
“Once we sign the lease, we pay the rent,” Allen said. “Then it’s up to us to try to recoup those costs.”
Allen said the two other costs that come into the calculation are garbage and administrative.
The pre-application has no bearing on whether a current liveaboard resident will end up in the marina. It’s primarily a way for the city to find out which types of moorage residents prefer to help define some of the negotiations.
“It’s not an agreement, it’s to get feedback on different configurations,” Allen said. “It doesn’t ensure moorage, and it doesn’t commit to the moorage.”
The previous council approved a 16-vessel option (12 transient spots, four residential) last October, but it became clear that the new council didn’t want a lease that would lead to eviction of members of the century-old liveaboard community that includes an estimated 16-20 people living on boats. The council has not decided how many residential spaces will be in the marina.
Besides the small number of residential buoys allowed under the first lease proposal, the main problem was that the lease costs for the buoyed vessels were potentially so high that few, if any, of the liveaboards could afford to live in the harbor. And the obvious outcome was not something many community members wanted to see happen.
Had the cost proved too high for liveaboard residents, the city risked being stuck with the rental payments and having very few, if any, tenants to collect from.
