The first project of the Marquette Plan is officially underway.

A groundbreaking ceremony was held Tuesday for a new Portage lakefront park that will be developed jointly by the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and the city of Portage.

The 66-acre beachfront park was previously part of the former Midwest Steel plant and was purchased in 2004 by the National Park Service. Through a cooperative agreement, Portage will develop and maintain a city beach on the national park property.

The new park, located on the west side of Burns Waterway, will include interpretive trails, a scenic overlook and an interpretive overlook. The park itself is part of a more ambitious project that includes a riverwalk along Burns Waterway and links with an expanded public marina, the city’s downtown, and the South Shore train station. In addition, the project includes a trail linkage between the east and west units of the National Lakeshore.

The project will involve the removal of the wastewater treatment plant that previously served the steel mill.

The Portage project is the first project to go forward under the Marquette Plan, a regional endeavor spearheaded by U.S. Rep. Peter Visclosky that seeks to open the Lake Michigan shoreline and surrounding areas for public access.

The participants in the first phase of the Marquette Plan are Portage as well as the Lake County cities of Gary, Hammond, East Chicago and Whiting. A second phase would extend the project eastward into the rest of Porter County and into LaPorte County.

Chuck Brimmer, a Visclosky staffer, said the Portage park project meets all the Marquette Plan’s criteria by both preserving green space and by opening the lakefront for public use.

Brimmer said that just as no one can imagine Chicago without Lake Shore Drive or New York City without Central Park, “one day you will not be able to think of Northwest Indiana without the Marquette Plan and its open spaces.”

Visclosky secured federal funds totaling $300,000 to demolish the treatment plant, with the city providing a 25 percent match. In addition, the National Park Service spent $3.6 million to purchase the property, which was placed in the authorized boundaries of the Indiana Dunes National lakeshore in the 1976 expansion bill.

“We spent the next 20 years cleaning it up,” said City Planner A.J. Monroe, referring to the previous use of the property as a disposal site for hazardous pickling liquor sludges.

The city of Portage will now ask the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority for $5 million to proceed with the park development, Monroe said.

The request before the RDA will be made at the June meeting. If the RDA votes to approve the funding at a subsequent meeting, Monroe said the city will hire a planning consultant. It will likely take about a year for the environmental assessment and other planning studies, then about two years for the actual park construction, he said.

Brimmer said Visclosky continues to work with the other Marquette Plan’s projects, but that the next one that appears ready to go forward is in the city of Whiting, in which the lakefront park will be improved and expanded.

Posted 5/31/2006

Posted 5/31/2006