Four years of hard work are set to pay off for developer Matthew Coté this fall with the launch of his $17 million Marpole-area Milltown Marina and Boatyard.
The Richmond Island commercial marina, located in the Richmond slough, a body of water between Vancouver and Richmond, should also help provide some relief from chronic moorage shortages for Metro Vancouver boat owners.
Port Metro Vancouver, the federal agency in charge, approved an application from Milltown Marina & Boatyard Ltd. in December 2012 to grant Coté and his partners a 50-year lease to allow for the development of the commercial marina.
Plans call for Milltown to have moorage space and dry stack storage for more than 400 recreational vessels.
A public pedestrian and bike path to be built beside the road on the existing causeway from Marpole’s Bentley Street to Richmond Island peninsula will provide access to the marina’s public park, parking, marine service centre and restaurant.
“It is somewhat of a daunting process. Marinas are not approved that often,” said Coté, who needed permits from 17 different regulators, including the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the cities of Richmond and Vancouver, and Port Metro Vancouver, which controls the land.
The process took approximately 3½ years for Coté and his partners, the Musqueam Band and Bastion Development Corp.
Port Metro Vancouver’s June 2011 public consultation focusing on the marina documented numerous resident concerns about the project. They ranged from the environment and traffic to noise.
Many of their suggestions were implemented in the development, including:
•a ban on the use of Seadoos and jet skis at the marina; and
•the creation of a public bike and pedestrian pathway and three habitat islets at the western end of the slough to compensate for dredging and pathway construction.
Richmond and Vancouver city councils decided in February 2012 that even though Richmond Island geographically belongs to Richmond, the City of Vancouver would provide access to water services, because of the causeway connection.
Coté, 60, grew up in Marpole in a family of avid boaters.
Coté’s brother Paul, one of the co-founders of Greenpeace, won a bronze medal in the soling class at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Coté himself worked as a tug deckhand for RivTow Marine at an early age, hauling logs into the slough, where they were stored for the Eburne sawmill.
After living in Whistler for many years and developing several large real estate projects there, Coté earned his captain’s papers and was in command of large sailing yachts for seven years, which exposed him to international marinas, good and bad.
When he retired from skippering yachts, he returned to Vancouver in search of a suitable site to start his own marina.
He was familiar with the Marpole site, because his brothers and father built their own sloop, the Milltown, in a rented warehouse in the area.
He was also familiar with the chronic squeeze for moorage spaces for local boat owners.
Currently, waiting lists for moorage in Vancouver can stretch up to eight years.
But Terry Slack, who has 65 years’ experience as a commercial fisherman and more than 30 years as a boat builder in Marpole, is critical of the Milltown development.
Concerns for the co-founder of Pacific Spirit and Deering Island parks include heavy traffic on Friday nights and preserving the slough as a transition zone for young salmon.
He wants the location preserved as a heritage site.
Musqueam councillor Wade Grant sees the Milltown Marina development as an economic opportunity for his people because the band is a co-owner of the marina, which will create jobs in the marine trade and at its restaurant.
The economic impact is one of the arguments that convinced Claudia Laroye, spokeswoman for the Marpole business improvement association, to support the project.
For boaters, who will pay annual moorage fees ranging between $3,200 and $13,000 and up to $3,700 for dry stack storage, depending on the length of the vessel, Coté said the marina’s location near the west side of the Granville Bridge, the Alex Fraser Bridge and the airport makes it an easy to commute from many parts of Vancouver and Richmond.
