A 1950s-era bridge connecting Collins Island with Balboa Island in Newport Bay is set to be replaced, and the plan is to make it more resistant to higher tides and storm surges as sea levels rise.

The Newport Beach City Council has approved having city engineers move forward with plans to rebuild the Collins Island Bridge. The island’s owners built the bridge in 1953 as a private project. In 1959, the city took over responsibility for the structure.

The bridge connects Collins Island, home to eight luxury properties, with the larger Balboa Island. The islands are manmade, formed from material dredged up from Newport Bay in the early 1900s.

The next step in the bridge project is to get California Coastal Commission approval. If that goes well, construction could begin in September, with completion set for March 2027.

The $3.8 million replacement project would include installing a new bridge, creating smoother bridge approaches and street, sidewalk and landscape improvements. There would also be provision for a future pump station. The new bridge would be wider and longer, and new seawalls would extend 100 feet on each side at the perimeter of Balboa Island.

The project is the first of several phases to protect Balboa and Little Balboa Island from rising sea levels, officials said. Over the next 15 years, the city plans to increase the seawall to 10 feet around the entire perimeter of Balboa Island.

“This is all about sea level rise,” said Bob Stein, the city’s assistant engineer on the project. “We really need to pay attention because we don’t know how fast it is rising.”

Studies done by experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicate with moderate greenhouse gas emissions, sea levels are predicted to rise 7 inches to 12 inches by 2050. With higher increases in emissions, NOAA estimates sea levels along the coast could increase by up to 21 inches by 2050.

Presently, there are 9-foot-tall seawalls near the bridge, and while they still seem to be holding back the water, Stein said, their footing is not deep enough in the bay. An inspection last year found them to be “minimally tolerable.”

New steel plates would help with stabilization and be buried deeper into the bay mud. Stein said the new seawalls would be built outside the seawalls now on the boardwalk, which were built between 1929 and 1935 and are showing “signs of distress. “

In the approved plan, the new bridge would be a little wider, from 19 feet to 20.5 feet, to accommodate a 13.75-foot travel lane, a 4-foot-wide sidewalk, and concrete barriers on each side of the roadway.

The bridge would span 31 feet and connect to each side’s concrete barriers. The total distance from Balboa Island to Collins Island is 61 feet.

Stein said Park Avenue from Bay Front Alley would also be improved, and there would be a smoother transition from the roadway to the bridge. The roadway transition onto Collins Island would also be improved. Existing sewer, water, and dry utility lines would be replaced within the new bridge.

The project would also include a stormwater pipeline placed on Park near the Bay Front sidewalk to prepare for a stormwater pump station near the bridge.

The seawalls would be higher and stronger than the present concrete barriers. New caps would be put on the bay side of the existing wall, with the top coping at 10 feet, with room to add a future cap that could go up to 14 feet. Private homeowners building in that area are expected to have seawalls at 11 feet.

Construction of the new seawalls on each side of the new Collins Island Bridge would be the start of a larger project to increase the height of the seawall around the entire Balboa Island.

An analysis of the island indicated the Collins Bridge and the Grand Canal area, which is between the larger Balboa Island and the smaller Balboa Island, are priority locations for taller protection, said Jim Houlihan, the city’s deputy public works director. After these areas are addressed, the next phase would stretch from the Collins Bridge to the Balboa Ferry area and to Emerald Street on the north side.

The walls surrounding Little Balboa and its deeper water areas would be next, with the last part of the plan increasing sea wall height at beach locations on the larger Balboa Island. Overall, the project would take about 15 years.

“We’re proposing to move forward with 10 feet so everyone would see what would happen over the next 15 years,” Houlihan said.

“We’re already seeing the sea level when we get king tides getting closer to 9 feet,” he said. “If we hadn’t raised (the seawalls by 9 inches) in 2018, we’d constantly be having problems with water coming over the walls. This is the next step.”

When construction on the Collins Bridge gets underway, Stein said efforts would be made to avoid resident impact as much as possible. There would likely be dedicated truck routes, and workers’ parking could be off the island, he said. A noise coordinator would also be present to ensure residents have resources should the construction become too loud.

Stein said a temporary pedestrian bridge may also be built for residents of Collins Islands to use to get back and forth, but that would require them to park their cars on Balboa Island.

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