GALVESTON, Texas—Despite being surrounded by water, Galveston’s free access to the bay has been limited since Hurricane Ike knocked out one of the most popular boat ramps in the county.

While considering a plan to put a “Band-Aid” on the 61st Street boat ramp, county officials said it will be next year before the ramp area and adjacent park will be fully functional again.

More than half the county-managed boat ramps and piers are damaged or inaccessible because of Hurricane Ike, county Parks Director Dennis Harris said.

Three, including 61st Street and two on the Bolivar Peninsula, are closed because of extreme hurricane damage.

Others, such as the ramp near Fat Boys in Tiki Island, are usable but the adjacent piers are damaged, Harris said.

Last week, county commissioners approved a plan to begin the engineering work needed to restore the 61st Street ramp in Galveston, the island’s only public boat ramp.

The one-acre Washington Park and boat ramp won’t be cheap to fix, especially to a level to better weather future storms. Harris wants to elevate the parking area and the park itself and harden the bulkhead that fronts Offatts Bayou.

It would cost about $302,000 to repair and enhance the boat ramp side of the park alone, Harris said. Another $120,000 would be needed to rebuild Washington Park, he said.

Those cost estimates may be conservative, Harris cautioned.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency would pay for part of the work, while the county also has a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department grant to help pay for some of the work.

It could cost up to $1 million to repair and elevate the park.

Even with a plan in place, the county still has to get approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Harris said the county’s application, which has to include full design specifications, won’t be ready for the Army engineers until October.

The permitting process would take another eight months. So, it would be next summer before the county could even break ground on any repair work, Harris said.

Harris has proposed repairing one of the 61st Street piers and repaving the parking so the boat ramp could be used while the permitting process moved ahead. He did not have an estimate of how much that would cost, and the proposal would have to be approved by county commissioners.

Meanwhile, the county is considering shutting off half the pier that runs alongside the boat ramp near the Fat Boys Bait Camp under the Interstate 45 overpass in Tiki Island. The 400-foot pier was badly damaged by the storm.

In fact an entire section of the pier is gone, but fishermen still walk a tightrope along one of the surviving support beams to venture out to the pier’s end for deeper water fishing.

Harris estimated that county crews could repair about 200 feet of the pier, but that the fix for the remaining would require an outside contractor with a barge. The county also would ask the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help pay for the repairs, but that application process had not begun, Harris said.