Posted on August 2, 2023
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Wilmington District office is taking comments from the public on a proposed dredging permit for a long-planned Carteret County board launch facility in Bogue Sound in the Ocean community.
The project is to be built on a 67-acre parcel off Highway 24. It includes six ramps, a transient floating dock, a 159-space boat trailer parking lot and an access channel to the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.
Carteret County, the N.C. Coastal Federation and N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission are working together on the project. The site is also to be the future home of the federation’s new Center for Coastal Protection and Restoration and its new headquarters on 10 acres.
The reason for the public comment period is that the project will require new dredging within coastal wetlands, waters and submerged aquatic vegetation, as well as upland excavation at the site.
The proposed project includes living shoreline installations on the property and south of the proposed boat ramp facility to offset the loss of about 0.8 of an acre of submerged aquatic vegetation and habitat.
The federation is in the process of designing the Center for Coastal Protection and, there will also be a hiking trial connecting Bogue Sound to the Croatan National Forest on the property as well.
Comments must be submitted by 5 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 26 to Liz Hair, Wilmington Regulatory Field Office, 69 Darlington Ave., Wilmington, NC 28403, or to sarah.e.hair@usace.army.mil, or to WilmingtonNCREG@usace.army.mil.
In December 2021, the county announced it was gearing up to start work as soon as possible on the facility off Highway 24 next to the Morada Bay subdivision in Ocean.
The project, when built, is to be funded by $3.5 million allocated by the N.C. General Assembly in 2021 at the urging of then-Rep. Pat McElraft of Emerald Isle.
Of the $3.5 million allocated for the project, $2.5 million is for actual construction and $1 million is for dredging a channel in Bogue Sound to the site. Both require time-consuming permit approval processes.
The money came from the N.C. Shallow Draft Navigation Channel Dredging and Aquatic Weed Fund, which gets money from sales and transfers of boat titles and from the boat fuel tax.
The land acquisition cost was $7.4 million, with funds from the N.C. Coastal Federation, the state legislature and two state grants, including one from the N.C. Clean Water Management Trust Fund – now known as N.C. Land and Water Trust Fund – and the N.C. Parks and Recreation Trust Fund.
The U.S. Navy also provided funds and acquired a restrictive easement over the entire property to prohibit incompatible development near Bogue Field, a training site for the U.S. Marine Corps. Bogue Field is an auxiliary of Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in Havelock.
Some information for this article came from Coastal Review Online, the news service of the N.C. Coastal Federation.
