GREEN COVE SPRINGS – The pier at Spring Park in Green Cove Springs has been a source of enjoyment for many residents and visitors, but one of the city’s landmarks still needed a facelift.

A $600,000 grant from 2018 fixed all that.

People now can walk the pier, or fish off it or catch shrimp. The grant money covered an upgrade to the pier, including an addition of a wave break, rebuilding some of the floating dock areas and reroofing the gazebo.

“We have pretty much accomplished all of those almost completely,” said Steve Thomas, Assistant Public Works Director for the City of Green Cove Springs. “We did not get to finish the wave break. The wave break is there, and it’s built… we ran out of money and couldn’t go that far between engineering and all the work at the pier, we ran out before we could get the whole project done the way we wanted to.”

Work on the pier has been going on for about three months.

The biggest holdup, according to Thomas, was designing and permitting.

Prior to the project beginning, the permanent pier was in relatively good shape. New lighting was installed, and the roof was replaced on the gazebo. Then the wave break was built.

“All of that was completed,” said Thomas, “then we also put in the wave break, which is to slow a lot of the movement down [of the pier] from N’oreasters and storms. It’s built out and at an angle to the south, and it kind of kills the waves before they can get to that floating area.” If not for the wave break, over time, the waves would cause movement to the floating section of the pier, which would separate the sections over time.

The city has added between $10,000-$20,000 to the grant to arrive at the project’s current state of near completion.

The most considerable benefit to the city itself is the wave break. Thomas says that a lot of money is spent every few years because of the storms in repairs to the floating area of the pier.

“The wave break should help that situation quite a bit in extending the life of the floating stuff probably another two or three years more. I’m looking at four or five years before we have to do major stuff to it again,” Thomas said.

Thomas expects that eventually, the city will apply for another grant to complete everything in the plan for the pier.

“The citizens actually enjoy it [the pier],” said Thomas. “There is a lot of fishing that goes on, and this time of the year, there’s a lot of shrimping that goes on off that pier. Every night, if you go down there every night, people get there around three or four o’clock and start saving their spots all the way up to the gazebo almost, and they shrimp off of it just about every night. The pier is really used quite a bit.”