(Okoboji)– The Iowa Department of Natural Resources Thursday evening held a public informational meeting on a multi-million dollar project to stabilize and restore the shoreline at Pillsbury Point on West Lake Okoboji.
Like numerous other shorelines around the Iowa Great Lakes, Pillsbury Point was severely damaged by the 2024 high water event. Mike Hawkins of the DNR told the crowd a recently conducted engineering analysis shows a majority of the shoreline in the Pillsbury Point area is very susceptible to further degradation in future events…
“Two-thirds of the Pillsbury Point reach was rated as either urgent risk of collapse or high risk of susceptibility to collapse. A pretty significant amount of that shoreline, about 850 feet of it is in that urgent to high risk category with the rest of it, a lot of the rest of it, in that moderate risk of collapse.”
While most of the work will consist of stabilizing and restoring the shoreline, Hawkins says the project will consist of some other components as well…
“It’s an opportunity to improve the park, improve the view, improve the longevity of Pillsbury Point and really kind of bring it to a current day stability and use the technology to re-build those slopes and build in or engineer in a margin of safety for future collapse.”
Hawkins says the project will pose some special challenges to the contractor as some historic artifacts in that area will need to be protected…
“We didn’t want to disturb that historic foot path and those benches up there. We can’t build out into the water, and so the work that needs to be done has to be done within those bounds. And so that was a challenge for our engineers to work with.”
The DNR’s Natural Resources Commission is expected to approve a bid of just over $3 million for the project at their meeting this coming Thursday, August 13th. Midwest Industries of Spirit Lake submitted that bid. Depending upon weather, work could start yet this fall, with completion tentatively scheduled for September 1st, 2027.
The project also includes the demolition of 18 staircases that lead to docks in the Pillsbury Point Area. Hawkins says the removal of those is included as part of the project, but re-installing them will be the individual property owner’s responsibility and will be at their expense. He adds sovereign land permits will be required to make sure the re-installation of the staircases doesn’t interfere with the work on the shoreline.
