The East Mooring Basin causeway will be removed.

The Port of Astoria will tear down the East Mooring Basin causeway, a rapidly deteriorating piece of infrastructure that has long been a headache for the Port.

On Tuesday, the Port Commission voted to authorize a contract with Bergerson Construction for the removal of the entire causeway, about 300 feet of which has already collapsed into the Columbia River.

In 2018, the Port closed the causeway to vehicle and foot traffic, requiring boat owners to access moored vessels by dinghy. In 2021, the causeway partially collapsed, knocking out power for boats and navigation lights. Since then, the causeway has continued to sustain further damage.

The Port had initially budgeted funding for dredging near the East Mooring Basin, but opted to redirect those funds to removal of the causeway.

“It just kind of happened to be this way, that the cost of that causeway removal was really similar to what the cost of dredging was going to be,” Will Isom, the Port’s executive director, said. “I know from a public standpoint, too, seeing some change down there and some things happening is good. There’s a lot of folks that want to see some major improvements, but having this infrastructure sitting there that was decayed, that has been condemned and shut down, that’s slowly collapsing — at some point it was going to need to be removed before we could really do anything out there.”

Isom said the Port does hope to rebuild the causeway at some point in the future, but that it falls lower on the Port’s priority list than huge projects such as the rehabilitation of Pier 2, the implementation of the waterfront master plan and the expansion of the boatyard.

“These things come down to priorities and timing,” he said. “I think it’s probably unrealistic to think that the Port is going to be able to do this on their own … We know that there is a demand for moorage, but it’s just a matter of, ‘How do you get the resources in place to make that happen in a way that is feasible?’”