The operator of the Bass Lake Beach is being asked to make some improvements to the beach house patio. A group of local residents and Starke County Park Board members has been working on a plan to stabilize the seawall surrounding the site. To help find a solution, they’ve obtained the original drawings from the seawall’s installation in 1988.
Resident Rick Anderson presented them during Tuesday’s park board meeting. “So the building foundation is good, but here’s all this fill that was put in here, a lot of it’s gone,” he explained. “And so you got just the concrete, and if it goes, you could have a collapse there. So that’s got to be refilled, and this is how it was originally done.”
He said repairing the wall shouldn’t be too difficult. “If I was doing this repair, what I would do is just get a little of this concrete out, enough to get in there, and sandbag it all the way up,” Anderson said. “I’ve done this before with sandbags, just fill them and get them loose and up against that expansion joint, which is very wide, and then put the sand back and put the concrete back. It’s not a huge job to fix that.”
The Indiana Department of Natural Resources has also suggested installing glacial stone around the seawall, to protect it from incoming waves and also help prevent sand erosion. The installation of the stone is estimated to cost about $5,000.
There was some discussion Tuesday about who is responsible for making the upgrades. In the end, board members agreed that the improvements should be considered maintenance. That means it’s up to Callahan Development, LLC to do the work, under the terms of its lease with the county.
What exactly counts as maintenance and what is a capital improvement has been an ongoing debate between Callahan and county officials. Park board member Roger Chaffins and County Attorney Marty Lucas agreed to draft a letter to Callahan, detailing the requested upgrades.
