After a long delay, the reconstruction of the Riverside Park boat ramp and floating docks, damaged by Hurricane Nicole in November 2022, may finally be back on track.

Construction now is scheduled to begin in August, with completion slated for December, according to Vero Beach Public Works Director Matt Mitts. He added that the city will order all materials needed ahead of time to make sure everything is onsite when construction begins.

Vero Beach engineering and  project management firm Coastal Technology Corporation was hired in January 2023 to oversee the project, which was estimated at that time to be completed by August 2023. But when engineers took a closer look, they found additional problems with the ramp, sidewalks and seawall that needed to be corrected.

“We were optimistic,” Mitts said. “But when we got into the engineering, design and permitting phase we realized that additional repairs were needed outside the scope of the storm damages. We then had to wait for responses from FEMA to see how much money we could get.”

Designs and permits were finalized in December 2023, with Requests for Proposals going out in January 2024. The lowest qualified bid from the six bidders was from Wilco Construction of Fort Pierce, which bid $445,850 to complete the project.

FEMA will fund $300,000 of the total estimated cost of $560,000. The city will be responsible for the repairs that were unrelated to the storm.

In the meantime, the city reopened the ramp on April 5, 2023, with a warning that the ramp can be slippery and that boaters would be using it at their own risk. Without the docks, it’s very difficult to enter larger boats once they are in the water, said boater Donna Brewer.

“It’s too dangerous to use it without the docks on the side to pull up to and get on and off the boat,” Brewer said. She and her husband, James, both age 70, have been launching their 20-foot Hydra-Sports vessel at the MacWilliams Park boat ramp instead.

That ramp is not designed for larger boats and is not ideal for the volume of boats that are using it now, Brewer said. The nearest ramps appropriate for vessels larger than 20 feet are in Fort Pierce or at Sebastian Inlet, she said.

The original ramp and docks in Riverside Park were built in 1975. The floating docks were replaced in 1989, and again in 2006 after they were destroyed by Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne.

Hurricane Nicole made landfall on the morning of Nov. 10, 2022, as a Category 1 hurricane that was soon downgraded to a tropical storm, with sustained winds of 40 miles per hour, a storm surge of three to four feet and heavy coastal erosion. In addition to the boat ramp and floating docks, Nicole also seriously damaged the boardwalks at Conn Beach and Humiston Park.

Repairs are mostly complete at Conn Beach, but the boardwalk at Humiston Park, in the heart of Central Beach, still has not been repaired a year and a half after the storm.