City officials plan to submit an application in the coming weeks for a $14 million federal grant to replace an aging bulkhead in downtown Wilmington.

In 2023, the city purchased a 1.6-acre site at 201 N. Water St. from the U.S. Coast Guard for $1.2 million. The site, which includes the 500-foot segment of bulkhead slated for replacement, served for more than two decades as a mooring location for the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Diligence, which left the city in 2020. A bulkhead is a structure that acts as an engineered shoreline to prevent erosion.

Since buying the site, the city has repaired holes in the 59-year-old bulkhead, said Justin Carter, the city’s director of design and construction, and put up a fence in February to secure the site. The area is situated at a “key middle point in the Riverwalk," he added.

City officials hung an array of brightly decorated buoys painted by community members and some city staff on the fence on Thursday in an effort to enhance the area’s appearance while waiting for the bulkhead's replacement, Carter said.

“We're talking about an extended period of time before we really start breaking ground on construction,” he said, “so the hope is that these buoys can last a year to two years.”

The city is pursuing a grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration’s FY2025 Disaster Supplemental Grant Program. So far, the city has received more than 250 public comments in support of the grant application, Carter said.

In April, the Wilmington City Council approved a resolution authorizing City Manager Becky Hawke to apply for the grant, which requires a local match of 20% of the total project cost or $3.5 million in city funding. 

Carter said on Thursday that the city’s portion of the funding would come from cost savings from some of the city’s other Riverwalk projects. He added that officials began looking at grant options to help fund the bulkhead replacement around the end of last year. 

The grant application process has involved collecting various data points related to economic development, including the county’s GDP, the number of businesses and the number of people employed in the Central Business District, visitors to the Riverwalk and tourism spending.

Carter said the timeline for getting an answer on the grant, once it's submitted, is unclear. The grant would fund the removal and replacement of the current steel bulkhead with a concrete relieving platform that will make inspecting and maintaining the structure easier, he said. 

Although there were previous preliminary plans for a park on the site, Carter said, the city isn’t currently committed to a specific use for the property. He said planning for the area will involve public engagement moving forward.

“Replacing that bulkhead puts the ground, the foundation in for what we can do to build forward,” he said, “whether it’s putting a park or other city facility down here, whatever the case is, it has to start with getting that foundation fixed.”