BRADENTON BEACH – Improvements to the Coquina Beach multi-use trail have been delayed.
The trail is a paved path about the width of a city sidewalk that begins at the Longboat Pass parking lot and runs 1.5 miles along the beach north to Fifth Street South.
Manatee County commissioners approved $1.3 million in tourism funds for improvements to the trail at an Aug. 8 meeting. Under the scope of the new project, workers will resurface and widen the trail, but its location and length are planned to remain unchanged.
The project also includes the removal of 96 Australian pine trees whose roots are damaging the pavement.
The removal was scheduled to take about eight months to complete, but work was recently halted.
The Sun contacted Manatee County Information Outreach Manager Bill Logan to find out why. Logan responded with an email statement from Manatee County Public Works Senior Project Engineer Michael Sturm.
“The trail restoration project began back in October, clearing the area around the trail of 20 trees,” Sturm said in his email. “We are currently installing root barriers in areas where the trees could impact the trail in the future. As for the actual removal and replacement of the trail, I received an update yesterday (Nov. 29). The asphalt plants are getting ready to shut down until the beginning of the new year. This supply issue will impact our schedule and push out the completion date. We plan to mill segments of the trail that can then be paved on the same day. So, the actual work on the path will start in early January, making it hard to provide project phasing and timeline estimates.”
Manatee County leaders are no strangers to delays due to supply chain issues. The drainage project at Coquina Beach, which caused the long-term closure of hundreds of parking spaces in 2021-22, also fell well short of the original completion timeline due to supply issues.
The county currently spends between $35,000 to $40,000 a year maintaining the trail and public works says that the steps being taken with the new trail will save that money because the tree roots will no longer be an issue. If this holds, about a third of the cost of the project would be covered by the nearly half a million in repair dollars that wouldn’t need to be spent over the next decade.
Bradenton contractor Woodruff & Sons has been retained for the trail project.
