Remodeled Empire beach draws varying reactions

Glen Arbor Sun

“This will not be your grandmother’s beach, not the beach you’ve had here the last 50 years,” Empire Village Council member Karen Baja admitted to concerned local residents in mid-June during a meeting of the Park Committee, which makes recommendations to the Council on matters concerning the public beach.

As she spoke, trucks were busy laying new asphalt on the road, sidewalks and parking lots at Empire’s magnificent public beach. The basketball court had already been temporarily razed, and walls erected between the parking lots and the beach. But most striking of all, a new playground — gigantic by the beach’s previous standards — now dominated the view for those arriving at the beach and, as it turned out, the view from much of Storm Hill as well.

The Empire beach project is the result of a $500,000 state matching grant to upgrade and rebuild facilities like the public bathrooms, the road and sidewalks, and multiple private donations, which foot the bill for the new playground. To a minority of locals, the playground, the wall and the concrete are eyesores that damage the best public beach for miles around, and an example of local government failing its constituents. To others, it solves some of the beach’s biggest problems, and turning down the money available once the grant was secured would have been akin to looking a gift horse in the mouth. At a Village Council meeting on June 26, most locals spoke in favor of the project, and a couple of concerned youngsters pleaded for the new playground to be kept where it is. One even offered a list of 72 signatures in support of it.

The Empire beach project will undoubtedly attract larger crowds, especially children eager to enjoy the playground — a product of Gametime Corporation in Atlanta and the kind used in most schools and municipalities. Baja calls it “the Ford of playgrounds … not a Rolls Royce and not a Vega: we went with the middle ground.” Yet Empire’s new beachscape will probably go down as the most controversial local story of the summer.

Janet Weiler lives in nearby Lakeview Orchards, just east of Empire on M-72, and she comes to Empire beach to swim a mile every day during the warm weather to prepare for triathlons. “I moved here 12 years ago because I love Lake Michigan and our beautiful beach. I think what these people did here is a desecration of a beautiful spot that we were given here in Empire with a moral obligation to maintain. It breaks my heart to see artificial structures distracting from the amazing view.”

Ashlea Walter, a member of the Village Council who, like Baja serves on the Park Committee, takes a pragmatic approach. “I admit that when you first see (the new beachscape), it looks tall. Before, the only tall features were the slide and swings. What I think we all struggle with is that when living in a village or municipality, we have to consider the good of the whole. My frustration is that this has been in process for a while now. We’ve seen the schematic drawings; we’ve seen it on paper. We have held dozens of meetings about the playground.

“It’s probably not my first pick for playground material, but it’s wonderful to see how many kids are using it already — more than I’ve ever seen before the Fourth of July.”

The plan to remodel the Empire beach began over four years ago when deputy clerk Darleen Friend applied for a state grant to rebuild the public bathroom, which had fallen into disrepair, and fix the beach’s chronic septic problems. Encouraged by the Traverse City-based engineering firm Gosling Czubak (the Village’s sole client) and empowered by Empire beach’s prime spot on Lake Michigan and its proximity to the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, the Village won the matching grant, which stipulated it would receive two-thirds of the $500,000 from Lansing and come up with the rest itself. The approval came as a surprise to many, and it allowed the Village Council to give the beach much more than cosmetic changes — like building walls.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” — Robert Frost

Len Shalda, Superintendent of Empire’s Department of Public Works for the last three decades, had been calling for the erection of a wall between the parking lots and the beach to stop sand from migrating to the pavement.

“The last several years we’ve hauled out 300-400 yards of sand per year that blows onto the street,” he says. “We’d stockpile as much as we could, and the sand was free for anyone who wanted to come and get it. But the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) wouldn’t let us put it back on the beach. Being in a critical dune area, we have to do what the DEQ says.” As for concrete, the DEQ stipulates that the wall must be portable. “We have to be able to move it if they tell us to,” explains Shalda.

The series of walls along the axis where sidewalk and road meets sand, from the southernmost parking lot near the Empire Anchor to the Lighthouse near South Bar Lake, are between two and four feet tall. They are made of a shade of poured concrete that, Shalda says, “blends in with the beach. As walls go, this is a neutral color.” He contrasts the walls at Empire beach with the ugly cement gray of the walls at the public beach in nearby Frankfort — not to mention the lack of aesthetics paid to infamous walls in Berlin, China, Palestine and the Mexican border.

Some who visited Empire beach during June, while construction was underway, grimaced at the sight of a wall that had replaced an open view of sand and water. While sitting in one’s car, one was no longer able to watch the sun set into Lake Michigan. (The sidewalks and parking lots, themselves, have since been raised by 6-12 inches to alleviate the problem of seeing over the wall. In turn, critics accuse the engineers of solving a concrete problem by adding more concrete.)

Locals like Weiler say they were aware that a wall was to be built, but that they had no idea it was to be so high, or so out of touch with the natural landscape. “Maybe we needed some sort of barrier,” Weiler admits. “But we could have used dunegrass, or snow walls, or something to enhance the land rather than desecrate it.”

Holly Sorenson takes her criticism a step further. She claims she has tried to participate in the political process toward shaping how the remodeled beach would look, but to no avail. “About 50 of us met at the Town Hall and divided into groups to brainstorm alternative ideas after the original plan was unveiled. We came up with creative, wonderful ideas, but the Village Council voted 4-3 against us on every point. The Council thought they were doing good things, but they used bad judgment. They didn’t consult the community.” Another local attested that one of the key ideas that emerged from an “Envision Empire” brainstorming session more than five years ago was to install wooden boardwalks to benefit pedestrians. Somehow the boardwalk morphed into concrete sidewalks.

“Furthermore,” says Sorenson, “It was all completely backwards to hire an engineer for this project who had never done any beach work before.”

To be fair, the beachscape recommendations of Baja and Walter, as well as former Park Committee member Cheryl Fettes, were overruled by the other Village Council members, many of whom were voted out of office last November. Baja supported the wall because she envisioned it saving the parking lot — “a nice, utilitarian addition because otherwise the asphalt would crumble as cars parked closer and closer to the sand,” she says — while Walter did not support the wall.

“Ashlea and I inherited this,” Baja said. “The grant had already been applied for and awarded prior to our arrival (on the Park Committee). There is a new village council now, but we decided not to go back and revisit for fear of losing the grant. We assumed that the majority of people wanted improvements made to the beach.”

Private money on public land

The playground was the result of a dialogue that began with Baja in April, 2006 and led to $38,000 from two big donations and hundreds of smaller contributions from local residents who wanted to improve the existing playground for their children and grandchildren. The Village also took advantage of another matching grant, this one from Gametime, which agreed to match private donations dollar-per-dollar in the name of fighting childhood obesity. Critics have compared the playground, a two-story, multicolored plastic giant that sits just to the east of the basketball court and next to the swings, to an indoor jungle gym at a fast food restaurant. Once community volunteers erected the playground and realized that it dominated the beachscape, one asked if it could be moved elsewhere, possibly closer to the dock at South Bar Lake.

“Why did they pick this strange, bright-colored plastic and put it on public land?” Sorenson wonders. “I have friends who aren’t going to the beach now. It breaks their heart. We didn’t have to take that money just because it was there.”

As for public input, Baja points out that people didn’t seem very interested in the playground during public meetings over the last year and a half. More attention has focused on remodeling the beachscape. The playground was always a separate entity, though the construction for both projects took place in June for logistical reasons.

Naturally, both local and visiting kids are thrilled about their new playpen, and Baja emphasizes that making kids feel more included was one of the goals of the beach renovation.

Jack Gyr, a recent transplant to Empire from Benzie County, feels conflicted between aesthetics and practicality. “The playground and its castle rooftops look like something at the Magic Kingdom, and Disney World belongs in Florida, not here. At the same time, if kids are using and enjoying the playground, we adults should avoid getting too whacked out. Similarly, the walls are too high, but I saw people sitting on them like benches the other day watching the sunset.”

To Weiler, landscape integrity trumps all else. “Of course kids are going to love the playground. This has become like the checkout counter at the grocery store, where they beg for candy even though they don’t need candy. We go to the beach to love the sand and the sky, and the beauty of it all. We don’t need artificial things like that playground. And anybody who has any aesthetic sense would see that.

“What they’ve done ruins the beach. And they did it because they had the money.”

Arguing aesthetics, though, is like arguing over religion, admits David Hendricks, who held an informal gathering in mid-June attended by around 15 people concerned with the beach renovation.

Moving the playground would not conflict with the grant, Baja says, because it was funded with private donations, and would require only a community consensus and funds. But if the meeting on June 26 is any indication, the majority of the Empire public supports the new beachscape, and the playground and walls are here to stay.

The Glen Arbor Sun welcomes letters to the editor concerning the Empire beach controversy. Please email them to editorial@glenarborsun.com.