Nehalem Bay State Park prepares for major infrastructure upgrades

Rangers at Nehalem Bay State Park are preparing for extensive upgrades to their power and water systems along with other projects that are scheduled to be carried out during a park closure from November 1 to the end of June 2025.

Park Manager Ben Cox said that the work will not yield many new facilities for the public but will allow the park to continue serving the community and visitors for years to come.

“That’s the non-sexy infrastructure stuff that we really need to meet demand and maintain the capacity we have,” Cox said.

Funding for the $11 million in work is coming from general obligation bonds that were approved by the Oregon legislature in 2021 to help improve state parks.

Cox said that even before the funding became available, he and other parks staff had been asked to come up with a list of projects at Nehalem State Park that needed funding. Cox said that during a spit balling session the group had come up with a list of 20 to 25 ideas and sent it in to a committee for review.

After the bonds were approved, that committee evaluated requests from parks across the state, weighing the age of their infrastructure against visitor statistics and demographics to eventually choose nine parks to receive funding across the state.

Having received a green light from the selection committee, Cox and the team at Nehalem Bay State Park hired a project manager and other consultants in 2022 to get the ball rolling on the upgrades.

Whereas the original list of projects included ambitious items like adding 14 camper cabins and a new 50-campsite loop, once preparatory work began, it became clear that the allocated funds would not support all the ideas. Cox said that this led the team to pare back the list and focus in on projects that were necessary.

“Let’s kind of pull in our horns and focus on those things that we know that we need,” Cox said he remembered thinking.

Prime among those was the need to upgrade the park’s water and electrical infrastructure, much of which dates to the park’s construction in the early 1970s.

All the park’s 265 campsites currently receive water via PVC pipe, through a system whose valve locations are lost to time, making localized issues necessitate widespread shutdowns. The system will be completely replaced with a new system of high-density polyethylene pipes that will allow each campsite’s water to be turned off in isolation, if necessary. The new water system will also be complemented by a new main along Necarney Boulevard.

Electrical upgrades will occur at around half of the campsites, with 50-amp service replacing the current 30-amp service to match the amperage available at the park’s other sites following a 2015 upgrade and accommodate modern RVs.

These upgrades will allow visitors to utilize more peripherals on their vehicles on hot days, when the current system’s capacity is strained by high air conditioning use.

The day-use restroom at the south end of the park will also be added to the sanitary sewer system, as will the concessionaire who offers horseback rides.

Other projects will include the addition of a new restroom facility between the C and D campsite loops, neither of which currently has facilities, repaving of the park’s main road near the entrance and adding two snowy plover docent sites. The docent sites will be staffed by volunteers and used to help increase awareness of the endangered species’ habitat at the park and the need for visitors to avoid it for conservation.

Additionally, nine campsites will be upgraded for full ADA-accessibility, including paved access to restroom facilities, easy-grip water faucets and expanded maneuvering space.

The upgrades are scheduled to begin November 1, but that date is up in the air as the park has run into pushback from neighbors in the permitting process at the county.

Cox explained that the confrontation began when consultants advising the park on the project recommended that they submit a master plan to the county for conditional use approval as part of the permitting process. The master plan was developed in 2009 and includes all the current projects as well as potential future expansions that Cox emphasized were not funded or planned for any time soon.

However, when neighbors were notified by the planning commission about the park’s application, they became concerned about the potential traffic impacts of increased capacity at the park, according to Cox.

This led a group of neighbors to challenge the conditional use master plan’s approval before the county’s planning commission, where it was approved, and appeal that decision to the board of county commissioners.

A hearing on the appeal is set for late September, according to Cox, but the kerfuffle has already forced the project’s start date to be pushed back a month from October 1.

Cox said that in retrospect he felt much of the tension could have been avoided if park staff had communicated more clearly with neighbors from the beginning of the process but that he and the team were committed to better communications going forward.

Despite the delay, Cox said that the project team is still aiming to complete the work and have the park reopened by June 30, 2025, thanks to building a a healthy contingency into their original work schedule.

Cox also said that the decision to close the park had not been taken lightly, that his staff did not like closing parks and that they would reopen it as soon as the construction was complete. Cox stressed that the decision to close the park to the public had been made to maintain safety and that it was not something they were familiar with doing.

“When you look in our management unit, most of our parks don’t have gates because they never close,” Cox said. “We are not the close-the-park people.”