Bristol Borough is receiving $1.5 million for a water front expansion project officials announced.
Council President Ralph DiGuiseppe made the announcement at Monday’s Council meeting.
The funds are specifically earmarked for building more docks on the Delaware River.
Borough Engineer Amanda Fuller said a federal grant is coming from the U.S. Department of the Interior Fish and Wildlife Service which is administered through the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission.
It’ll be one dock that we have proposed at this point coming off the opposite side of the pier, the fixed pier that’s there now. Obviously we have to go through engineering and permitting and there’s a lot involved with putting anything out in the Delaware River but that’s the current plan, Fuller said.
Fuller went on to explain that the borough has a local share account application pending for an additional $1 million through the Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED) for an additional dock related project. She said the borough would find out if those funds would flow into Bristol around November of this year.
Bristol officials announced
in the summer of 2024 that they would add more slips in line with last year’s success with riverside docks.
Borough officials declined to reveal the project’s proposed specifics.
DiGuiseppe said he wasn’t quite ready to “give those secrets away.”
The building of the original docks in 2015 is seen as an important factor in the subsequent success of attracting businesses to the Mill St merchant district.
In the summers of 2013/14, you could walk down Mill St beginning at Old Rt 13 and count the number of empty storefronts, which averaged about 12 a month.
Today if there is an open retail space, it is generally not for long. Now fine dining, specialty snack shops, an Italian themed expresso shop, and brick oven styled pizza call the stylized and seasonally decorated retail strip home.
