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 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.”

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.

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.