Provincetown Marina Archives - The Provincetown Independent

Provincetown Marina

HARBORWALK

Long-Delayed Marina Walkway Moves Forward

Lagasses address a public access requirement of their license to operate their pier

By Paul Benson Feb 19, 2025

PROVINCETOWN — A 1,825-foot-long public walkway that will allow people to walk out to the tip of the Provincetown Marina has taken two steps forward after years of delays.

A rendering of a public walkway that would wrap around the edge and tip of the Provincetown Marina. (Image courtesy Town of Provincetown)

The harborwalk was first required by a state license granted to the Provincetown Marina’s new owners, Charles and Ann Lagasse, in December 2016. The state had required the harborwalk to be built by February 2022, but the $6-million project was delayed by the pandemic and other permitting challenges, Charles Lagasse told the Independent in November 2021.

After a Dec. 13, 2023 inspection by state regulators, the Lagasses gave the state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) a “verbal commitment” last spring that they would proceed with the project.

On Oct. 21, 2024, the town’s conservation commission granted an updated “order of conditions” for the construction of the harborwalk, including protections for native species that live in the area. A “silt curtain” will be installed during construction to prevent sediment from burying the eelgrass beds west of the pier, and no silt-producing work can take place between Feb. 1 and June 30 to protect winter flounder that spawn in the harbor.

On Dec. 13, the DEP approved updated plans for the harborwalk, including the relocation of the central section of the walkway onto the pier itself to avoid shading eelgrass beds.

It is the state’s unusual Chapter 91 law, which dates from the colonial era and ensures public access rights in intertidal areas, that mandated the public walkway project in the first place.

The law requires that intrusions onto tidelands and waterways include public access provisions, and updated regulations from 1990 specifically require 10-foot-wide public walkways on piers, former Harbormaster Rex McKinsey told the Independent.

“If you look at where Bay State Cruise Company lands at the World Trade Center in Boston, there’s a wide walkway all the way around the structure,” McKinsey said. “It’s the same for a lot of other piers in Boston. It looks like they’re for service trucks, but they’re open to pedestrians, and they’re required by 310 CMR 9.52” — the DEP code on uses of shoreline.

One of the town’s major concerns in 2016 was avoiding any loss of public parking spaces at the pier, McKinsey said, which is why the town’s harbor plan called for the walkway to be cantilevered or built on new pilings rather than on the existing pier.

“That’s what made this project so much more expensive,” McKinsey said. “The cantilevering idea was to maintain as much parking as possible on the existing deck.”

The walkway will begin where the brick sidewalk on Ryder Street Extension ends, in front of the kite shop at 277A Commercial St. The first 70 feet will be made of concrete to allow the town’s DPW trucks to cross the walkway onto Ryder Street Beach for maintenance projects. After that, the walkway will transition to a wooden deck with railings, rise over a small dune near the 9 Ryder restaurant, and then head out over the water for about 500 feet.

As the harborwalk approaches the pier’s middle section near the marina’s office buildings, it will jog back onto the main part of the pier to avoid shading nearby eelgrass beds, project planner Erika Frazier told the conservation commission. This will result in the loss of 24 parking spaces, leaving a total of 186 spaces on the pier.

After that, the harborwalk will head back out over water and wrap around three sides of the large shed at the end of the pier, which has sat mostly vacant for years. In addition to the 10-foot-wide harborwalk, a 2,425-square-foot outdoor seating area will be built on two sides of that building — the southeast side that faces the harbor and the northeast side that faces MacMillan Pier.

Charles Lagasse told the conservation commission in August that the walkway would invite pedestrians at one of the busiest parts of Commercial Street — its intersection with Ryder Street near town hall — out to the waterfront.

“If people walking Commercial Street or Ryder Street see this continuous harborwalk, they’ll probably use it,” said Lagasse. “We think this promenade-type structure will be a legacy thing not only for Provincetown, but for us, too.”

Ann Lagasse told the Independent that “we think this will be a beautiful and significant addition to downtown Provincetown. We’re using ipe, a sustainable hardwood, for the base decking. This has been a long process, no question, but we’re excited about it.”

Why This Project?

At a series of conservation commission hearings in August and September, a few people wanted to know how the harborwalk had been conceived.

The harborwalk will be built on new pilings for most of its length but will run along the existing pier deck for a stretch near the current marina offices to protect eelgrass. (Photo by Paul Benson)

“This is being presented as a benefit to the town,” said commissioner Mark Adams. “Do we know that the town really needs this kind of hard structure there?”

At the Sept. 16 conservation commission meeting, harbor committee chair Michela Murphy read a letter from her committee asking state regulators to cancel the project.

“The committee suggests that the harborwalk stipulated in the Chapter 91 license may no longer be the most suitable use of public accommodation,” Murphy said. “In lieu of the harborwalk, we propose that the license holder consider adding a west-side dinghy dock to mitigate traffic in the ferry lane.”

Murphy also said there were a “growing number of seasonal and short-term visitors to town who are living on the water with limited access to amenities.” Her letter asked DEP regulators to require “the license holder to provide public shower facilities and a laundromat — substantial public benefits for harbor stakeholders.”

According to a 2008 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution report prepared for the property’s former owners, Robert and Vaughn Cabral, the pier — at that time called Fisherman’s Wharf — has been put to a variety of commercial and recreational uses and at one point did offer public showers to transient boaters. After a collapse in the tuna fishery in the 1990s, a whale-watch boat, a ferry offering service to New Bedford, and the 260-foot barge Provincia docked here.

McKinsey said that the request for a public-access walkway was put in the town’s harbor plan because of the 1990 state regulation that requires them.

“The Cabrals’ older licenses were grandfathered in, but the Lagasses’ newer licenses had to conform with the regulations,” McKinsey said. “This is happening because it’s required by state law.”

PROVINCETOWN MARINA

Walkway Work Will Start in Fall, Owners Say

The Lagasses’ license required that harbor walk be built by Feb. 2022

By Paul Benson Apr 17, 2024

PROVINCETOWN — A 969-foot-long and 10-foot-wide public walkway that Ann and Chuck Lagasse promised to build on the Provincetown Marina in 2017, not long after they became its new owners, will be ready next spring. At least that’s what Ann Lagasse told the Independent this week. Construction will begin in the fall, she said.

The Provincetown Marina receives boats large and small in the summer. (Photos by Paul Benson)

The harbor walk was part of the couple’s marina licensing agreement, a requirement linked to the state’s unusual Chapter 91 public waterfront law. It would extend from the MacMillan Pier parking lot all the way down the west side of the Lagasses’ pier and then wrap around its southern tip and part of its eastern edge, allowing walkers to enjoy views of the harbor from three sides.

The Lagasses, who live in Charlestown, bought the marina, then called Fishermen’s Wharf, from the Cabral family in 2016 through their company Ocean Havens LLC. The town assessor’s records show they paid $3.5 million for the property.

The harbor walk was supposed to have been completed in February 2022, according to a license agreement the Lagasses had signed with the state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) five years earlier.

That license required the Lagasses to seek one-year extension permits from the DEP if they failed to complete the work by the deadline. But in spite of the construction failing to materialize, no such extensions were ever granted, according to both DEP spokesperson Ed Coletta and Ann Lagasse.

According to documents the Independent received through a public records request, the DEP contacted the Lagasses with urgent questions about their public access amenities shortly after a meeting of DEP staff, town staff, and Provincetown’s harbor committee last Nov. 30.

Those inquiries led the DEP to conduct a compliance inspection at the Provincetown Marina on Dec. 13, 2023. The Independent filed records requests for the written results of that compliance inspection, but Coletta and DEP records response coordinator Victoria Wu both said that there is no written record of the findings of the inspection.

Nonetheless, conversations between the Lagasses and the state continued into the spring, Ann Lagasse said, and the owners gave a verbal commitment to the state that they would begin construction on the harbor walk this fall.

“We’ve been in conversations with the DEP, and the goal is to be started by this fall,” Lagasse said. “There are restrictions on doing construction over the water depending on the time of year because of fish and whale species. So, the project will start in the fall, and we believe it will be completed by next spring.”

In winter, the marina goes quiet but commands a view of the setting sun. The public-access harbor walk would run along the western edge of the pier.

The state did not give the project a new written deadline “as long as we committed to proceed,” Lagasse said. That commitment is not written, but “we did commit verbally,” Lagasse said. “We’re putting the project out to bid right now.”

Her company generally keeps project management and general contractor work in-house while putting out bids for smaller parts of the project such as electrical and plumbing, she said.

Lagasse declined to provide any bid requests or an estimate of how much the harbor walk is expected to cost, but she said that construction costs have been easing somewhat as pandemic-related inflation recedes. In a November 2021 story in the Independent, Chuck Lagasse put the cost of the walkway at $6 million — on top of the $20 million he said he would be spending on installing public restrooms at the end of the pier, along with a restaurant and event center.

“Prices have come down on a lot of products post-Covid, which is really fortunate,” Ann Lagasse said. “Trying to build with those prices and trying to get product all the way out there” was a challenge, she said.

The state’s public waterfront law, which dates to 1866, encodes colonial ordinances that go back to the 1640s. It protects the right of the public to “fishing, fowling, and navigation” in privately owned parts of the state’s intertidal zone.

In Provincetown, due to a unique colonial charter, however, nearly the entire intertidal zone west of Howland Street is publicly owned. It is not the current high-tide line that defines the public intertidal zone — it is the high-water mark from 1848, with some modifications based on the high-water mark from 1939, that sets the upper limit of “commonwealth tidelands.”

In practice, that means that more than 100 properties that face Provincetown Harbor are partly or wholly on public land. To compensate for this, property owners are expected to seek licenses from the DEP that provide some measure of public benefit in return for the continued private use of public land.

Harbor Access Gift Fund

The early December correspondence between the DEP and Lagasse included a notification that her company still owed the state $102,315.20 in “occupation and displacement fees” — about three-quarters of the $131,450 that had been assessed in the February 2017 license as compensation to the state for occupying public tidelands.

Her company has now paid that bill, Lagasse said. Coletta confirmed that the state received the payment.

The harbor walkway would run around the old Monument Fishhouse at the end of the pier, inside the pilings that support the floating docks.

But the town of Provincetown believes there is an outstanding bill of $44,188.60 that the company owes to the town’s Harbor Access Gift Fund as part of the Lagasses’ initial Chapter 91 license, which was signed in December 2016 and incorporated into the February 2017 license.

The 2016 license required the company to pay $205,500 in five installments at 4-percent interest — a total of $221,854.40.

The Provincetown Marina has made four payments, the most recent of which was received in September 2020, said Town Accountant Nick Robertson.

“According to the license agreement, they owe one more payment of $44,188.60,” Robertson said. “The town is planning on sending an invoice requesting this payment.”

Lagasse said she remembered the Harbor Access Gift Fund but had thought that obligation was paid off already.

“I recall the day we signed the final check — we thought it was the final check — and saying ‘Yes, that’s done,’ ” said Lagasse. “Maybe it’s not done. We’ll take a look at that.”

The 2016 license also requires the company to make the large building at the end of the pier available for periodic “community-sponsored” events.

Provincetown’s first official gay pride weekend included a dance party there in June 2018, the Provincetown Chamber of Commerce has its annual meetings there, and the TEDx Provincetown conference used the building in June 2022, Legasse said.

THE SCUTTLEBUTT

DMF Lifts Gear and Speed Restrictions in Bay

Right whales have departed, but two blues are seen

By Capt. Mike Rathgeber May 14, 2020

PROVINCETOWN — The much quieter than normal waterfront businesses are anxiously waiting to see what Gov. Baker does with the current stay-at-home and social distancing policies. It has given boat owners plenty of time to do all those little jobs on their boats they never had time for in a typical spring. Given Boston’s cancellation of all outdoor summer events, it’s hard to believe Cape towns will go the opposite way.

The Provincetown Marina is set to open on schedule on May 15. Unlike all other businesses on the waterfront, the marina is considered essential.

The state Div. of Marine Fisheries has lifted the Cape Cod Bay gear restriction for fishermen as well as the speed limits put in place every spring to protect North Atlantic right whales. These restrictions were supposed to end May 14, but recent aerial surveys by the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies showed that the right whales have departed.

Fishermen are now permitted to set traps in the waters north and east of Cape Cod. Boats smaller than 65 feet can now exceed the 10-knot limit. Right whales come into our bay to feed on the enormous amount of plankton that blooms here in the spring. That beautiful smell of melons when the wind is blowing towards land is the result of that plankton bloom.

Fishing gear restrictions and speed limits are designed to protect the highly endangered whales from becoming entangled and to prevent collisions. Right whales are slow moving, which makes it a challenge for them to avoid collisions with high-speed vessels.

There was a confirmed sighting of a pair of blue whales 12 miles east of the Outer Cape this past week. It’s not very often we get to see the largest animal on the planet around here. The last time I heard of blue whales in our vicinity, I was running the Dolphin VI and got a tremendous view of them up on the north end of Stellwagen Bank. There were large concentrations of krill in our waters at the time, and blue whales prefer these little shrimp-like creatures, which, when concentrated, appear as huge circular red patches on the surface. Hard to say if these blue whales were cruising to another area or hanging around, but time will tell, as it’s hard for an animal 100 feet long to go unnoticed for any length of time.

Not much to report on the fishing front, as so few are out there fishing. Striped bass continue to trickle in and have been caught in increasing numbers in the canal as well as the south- and east-facing beaches. Mackerel are also around, which the bass will follow.

Mackerel-colored swimming plugs and vertical jigs are favored at this time of year, as well as live-lining mackerel. Don’t forget: if you’re bait fishing this year, only circular hooks are allowed. The difference between a traditional J-hook and a circle hook is that the circle hook’s point is sharply curved back. Its use is increasing because the hook seems to catch more fish and is rarely swallowed — the circle hook usually impales the fish on the lips around the corner of the mouth. This theoretically decreases the mortality rate of undersized released fish, compared to traditional J-hooks.