After Ocean Shores Mayor Jon Martin sunk a golden shovel into a pile of dune dirt at the Chance a La Mer beach approach Friday afternoon, he also lifted a metaphorical weight off his shoulders.

The action signaled the start of construction on the High Dune Trail, the product of a five-year effort by the city that overcame a global pandemic, rising construction costs, an eminent domain dispute and challenges that lasted until the final stages of signing a contract for construction.

“This is a project that’s been in the works for a very long time,” City Administrator Scott Andersen after the city’s groundbreaking ceremony near the Chance A La Mer beach approach on Friday. “It had a lot of starts and stops. At a couple places it looked like we hit an impasse and it would never come to fruition, but staff and members of the community fought to make this happen, and it’s going to be really great for our residents and tourists.”

Construction crews from KR Homes have already mulled the dirt on about a third of the trail, removing vegetation to make way for a mix of asphalt and boardwalk. The $1.2 million trail will stretch three quarters of a mile, from the Chance A La Mer beach approach to the Damon Road entrance near the Lighthouse Suites Inn. Boardwalk will make up 335 feet of the trail, passing over areas of sensitive wetlands.

City officials said the trail should be ready by September, complete with interpretive signs provided by the Coastal Interpretive Center based in Ocean Shores.

The High Dune Trail was a passion project of late Mayor Crystal Dingler. Dingler and Sarah Bisson, Ocean Shores grant coordinator, began work on the project in 2018, Bisson said, when the city initially examined building a dune trail that would also function as a fire break. The city eventually decoupled those projects, but continued pushing for a dune trail, with the city council setting aside $264,000 in 2019 from the city’s budget toward the project.

But after the pandemic slowed work on the trail in 2020, cost of building materials grew significantly. Wetland surveys indicated the city needed to add more boardwalks, which meant more costly wood.

Luckily for the city, the state was willing to chip in. Bisson told The Daily World last year the project qualified for transportation funding because it will spread out traffic on highly congested beaches, provide an ADA-accessible option, and reduce erosion to highly-vulnerable dunes.

The city last year was awarded $277,000 from the Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Council of Governments, and filled the remaining costs with grants from the Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT). With funding secure, the city was set to break ground in June 2022.

The only problem was that it didn’t own all of the land where the trail was intended to go.

As part of the state’s funding requirement, the city had to conduct title searches to ensure it owned all the land necessary to build the trail. Initial title searches said the city was in the clear, but further investigation proved otherwise. A 200-foot section of dune in front of the Lighthouse Suites Inn — the northernmost section of plans for the trail — was owned by the hotel, meaning the city would have to secure right-of-way before building the trail.

Negotiations stood still for months, with hotel owners arguing the trail would disrupt views for guests. The city reworked the trail’s design, moving it a few hundred feet south of the original route.

Continued delays prompted the city last September to authorize the use of eminent domain if a deal couldn’t be reached. Ultimately, eminent domain wasn’t necessary — the city signed a $2,800 land use easement in November, clearing the city to award construction money to the highest bidder.

And even finalizing a contractor came with its own unforeseen challenges. The city first opened bids for the project in January, with seven construction companies vying to take charge. But when sent to WSDOT for approval, the lowest bid didn’t meet an agency requirement — that a certain amount of construction work be allocated to socially or economically disadvantaged businesses.

That forced the city to restart the bid process from scratch a few months later, although the blip didn’t delay the construction timeline. Despite the turbulent history of the High Dune Trail, its groundbreaking ceremony seemed to go smoothly.

Andersen told The Daily World earlier this year that original plans for the dune trail extended further south, but the city broke the project into two parts to make planning and funding more manageable. He said the city will pursue the remainder of the project once the northern section of the trail is completed this year.

“This is a huge project for us,” Martin said. “It’s just the beginning of what we’d like to accomplish.”

Contact reporter Clayton Franke at 406-552-3917 or clayton.franke@thedailyworld.com.