By Delayna Earley
The Island News
The Waterfront Advisory Committee held its monthly meeting on Monday, Oct. 6, and members discussed several important topics related to rebuilding the promenade in Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park in downtown Beaufort.
Since June 2025, a 40-foot-wide section of Waterfront Park, the promenade closest to the water, has been blocked off with large temporary fencing to keep anyone from entering the area after a structural analysis of the park found that there were structural concerns and significant deterioration and overstressed pilings within the platform structure.
Following a joint Beaufort City Council and Waterfront Advisory Committee on Sept. 23, to hear options of how to possibly fix the issue with the promenade, council members selected three proposals that they believed were the best solutions and would like to see more about – rebuilding a new relieving platform, building a seawall instead of an overhang or building a hybrid structure that would involve floating docks.
Engineers with McSweeney Engineers were tasked with coming up with preliminary renderings and information about each option that could be shown to council and could be shown to the public to get their opinion.
Which led to one of the big questions on the table during Monday’s meeting – what is the best way to get the public’s input, when should they do it and should it be open to everyone or should they target certain groups individually who may be more affected than others?
It was discussed that a survey may be the best option for the city to get input from the public about the project, and while business owners and building owners in downtown Beaufort will be directly affected daily by any work done at the park, it would be best to make one survey for everyone to fill out online and include certain questions on the survey that would allow those collecting the information to gauge the background and vested interested that an individual may have in the park.
The next monthly meeting of the committee is scheduled for Nov. 3, but committee members talked about scheduling a Special Called meeting in October to vote on and discuss the survey so that it could be posted before the Nov. 3 meeting.
Several committee members voiced concerns that they had heard from community members in the aftermath of the Sept. 23 meeting, such as the extended length of time that is anticipated for the project to completed and the aesthetic of the fencing if it really is to be along the promenade for the next 3 to 5 years.
There were suggestions made about how to possibly make the fencing more attractive, either by finding fencing that is lower and not so high as to block the view of the Beaufort River and many in the comments of the live online streaming of the meeting made comments about how local artists should be invited to come and paint the fencing to make it more appealing and reflect Beaufort’s art culture as well as serve a functional purpose of keeping people out of the unsafe area.
City Manager Scott Marshall said that the number of attendees at the previous weekend’s Beaufort Shrimp Festival shows that the addition of the fence to Waterfront Park has not kept people from coming to the park to enjoy the festivals and activities.
The committee also began discussions about big questions like do they want to build the infrastructure to accommodate cruise ships.
City Councilman Josh Scallate commented that even if the committee, council and community agree that they do not want to allow cruise ships to dock at Waterfront Park now, they should still look into seeing if they have the funds and ability to build the necessary infrastructure so that if the mindset changes in the future and Beaufort’s community and council does decide they want to allow cruise ships, they would be able to do that.
“My number one rule is it’s got to be built with the least amount of maintenance in the future as possible. We can’t keep doing this,” Mike Sutton said.
Delayna Earley, who joined The Island News in 2022, formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
