The Unfinished Dock, the Unanswered Questions at Harbor View Marina

[XLFD]

On April 8th, the City of Ludington (COL) and Harbor View Marina (HVM, a state-owned, city-leased entity) announced that they were excited that the $2,000,000 'A' dock project was underway and that it would be ready by May, presumably before the summer's unofficial start on Memorial Day weekend when both public marinas are typically at full capacity. 

Yet here we are at the Memorial Day weekend and what do we see down at the 'A' dock?  The south side of their parking lot filled with dock parts, construction equipment, and refuse, and a less-than halfway done project that hasn't made any perceivable progress in over a month:

Oddly enough, after their April 8th announcement they had made a lot of progress on the project by April 15th, the Ludington Torch took the picture below showing that the length of the dock had been lowered into the area where the old dock had been.  Compare these two pictures taken over five weeks of time:

The loss of marina revenue by not having these available by this time is bad enough, but why isn't this project being worked on at all?  Is the contractor not getting paid promptly for their work thus far, or did the core source of funding, 3/4 of which is being paid with a state grant, dry up?  The plan was to have the COL pay for the work as it was being done, and then have themselves be reimbursed by the state at a later date, was there some sort of interruption in the funding source that made it so the contractor had to pause until they had a better guarantee that they would be paid?

We may never know as this COL administration has embraced unaccountability and non-transparency in their actions, and so we have no update on either of their social media sites, no explanations coming from city leaders at public meetings, and nothing at their official Marina News site. 

Is the state finally figuring out that their Waterways Commission is only an advisory committee and does not have the authority to make the ultimate decisions on these projects?  Or maybe EGLE (formerly, the Department of Environmental Quality) step up and covertly halt the project after reviewing the dismal environmental profile of that area and how it has been mostly ignored in the past?

We may never know, since both the city and marina managers are choosing to remain tight-lipped while the HVM parking lot is 40% filled with construction materials and a project is on at least a 38 day hiatus extending into the hundred plus change days of the Ludington tourist season.