Improvements considered for Honeysuckle Beach

Hayden City Council members heard a few simple solutions for the problems at Honeysuckle Beach, but they don’t yet fully agree on the path forward.

Issues with increased traffic, crowding, limited parking or the occasionally mucky landscape from bad drainage are all common knowledge to council members and city staff, so the council met in a public workshop Tuesday to hear ideas to fix them.

“The ramp is very crowded all the time,” said Ed Peletski, member of the Hayden Parks Commission. “And one of the reasons for that is people move their boats up really close.”

Peletski spent a lot of summer 2022 at the beach, during high traffic hours, to study some of the most glaring issues and provide some ideas for solutions.

Boaters will typically park their boat as close as they can to the beach to shorten the trip to pick up their truck and trailer. The effect is blocking the launch and ramp and clustering vehicles in an ineffective jumble of boats and trucks.

“If you keep them away from that and say they can’t moor … this will relieve that,” Peletski said. “And it’s something that is a cheap fix.”

Peletski identified the biggest problems at the beach as boats mooring in the boat launch, vendors leaving watercraft rentals on the dock for users to pick up, large wake boats damaging the dock, canopies crowding the beach, canopy stakes damaging the sprinkler systems on the lawn, goose poop, limited access for people with disabilities and muddy grass.

He presented a handful of options to City Council members during the workshop.

The council may consider either budgeting for changes, which would be in the next fiscal year’s budget, or approve policies for enforcement, which would be in subsequent meetings.

Peletski identified handicapped access for the beach and dock as a problem, which is limited by turf buildup at the beach curbs.

“The turf buildup is really just the sand being tracked along the beach,” Public Works director Alan Soderling said. “It just builds up one step at a time.”

Peletski suggested a sidewalk that would go to the dock, which he hoped could also improve the muddy water overflow in the grass. A sidewalk could improve the turf buildup, but not help the lawn, Soderling said. Drainage is an issue from sprinkler leaks, heavy watering and limited water flow, but the sidewalk won’t help drainage. The sidewalk would help clean up the curb by the beach that becomes overgrown and difficult to traverse or maintain.

“Drainage is a separate issue that needs to be addressed,” Soderling said.

But Soderling wasn’t opposed to any of the solutions Peletski proposed, he just suggested that they all need approval and funding.

Other suggestions that haven’t been discarded include breakwater logs to reduce the wakes damaging the dock, limits on canopy use or size and a beach sweeper for goose poop and trash.

“Where do we take these suggestions next?” asked Mayor Scott Forssell.

The next steps will be for council to direct staff, who can proceed with writing policies for council approval, allocating funding to be put on next year's budget and reviewing a few violations of dock use that could clear up dock space.

“These are things that I support every one of them,” Soderling said. “There’s nothing on this list I don’t support. The question is the council has been pretty much … hasn’t wanted to move forward with any improvements down there over the last year and a half so … We’ve talked about it, but there’s never been any direction. We need some kind of direction of what the council wishes to do.”

Councilwoman Sandra White suggested the city take care of the sidewalk first.

The council also agreed to direct Soderling to put up a sign reading “no mooring beyond this point, launching and loading only,” to limit traffic in the launch route, but they won’t have a city code to back it up.