A $770,000 state grant has allowed the town to move forward with a more expensive but hopefully more resilient option for fixing the Garvan Point sea wall area near the Surf Club, with First Selectman Peggy Lyons saying the town will be able to preserve the sensitive and valuable land, hopefully without losing any beach front.

Governor Ned Lamont approved the monies as part of $1.2 billion in bonding at the end of July, with State Senator Christine Cohen (D-12) and State Representative John-Michael Parker (D-101) applauding the grant as important for protecting against sea level rise.

“With these funds, we will ensure that our Surf Club remains safe and secure—and a source of pride and joy for many years to come,” Parker said in a statement.

The town has included repairs or replacement of the sea wall in the Capital Improvement Program, or CIP, for half a decade at least, Lyons said. Early this year, the Board of Selectmen (BOS) discussed more immediate challenges as the infrastructure has decayed.

The CIP estimate for the project was around $800,000, but town officials had estimated as high as $1.1 million back in January. Lyons said she didn’t currently have a hard number on the total price with the design phase of the project still in progress, but that costs have continued to shift.

Different options would have potentially shrunk the picnic area there at the west of the Surf Club, but Lyons said the state grant will allow the town to hold onto most, if not all of that prime real estate.

“It’s also the best I think structurally to truly protect the area,” Lyons said. “So we’re just excited that we got the funding for it, and we’re going to try to get the final design plans moving quickly here.”

“The goal is to keep things as similar as possible,” she added.

There isn’t likely to be any shifting necessary in the already-ongoing design phase, according to Lyons, and the estimates that come out of that will be “fresh.”

The three options the town had considered were a concrete wall, a sloped revetment wall (typically made of stone or concrete blocks), or a hybrid revetment that includes a sheet pile, which is a wall of sheet materials pile-driven into place.

Lyons said something like the hybrid option is the most safe and resilient of these options, though also more expensive, and is similar to what is currently in place at Garvan Point.

As far as timeline, Lyons said the town is working quickly but a lot of things remain up in the air, including whether or not work can be done during the winter and when the grant monies will be disbursed.

Former Beach & Recreation Director Scot Erskine said in January the wall was “an ongoing problem,” with the current stones failing to break up wave action and contributing to more coastal decay.

Erskine said it was also unclear if construction would disrupt beach season, but that the town would try to avoid that eventuality.