The head of the Westport Beach Committee wants the US Army Corps of Engineers to come to Westport to explain its plan to dredge the federal channel into Westport Harbor, and to dump the spoils off Horseneck Beach.

The corps, which last year added the approximately $1 million project to its list of 2024 fiscal year projects, is accepting public comment on the plan through Friday, March 15. At a beach committee meeting last Thursday, chairman Sean Leach said it is imperative that the corps also come here to listen to public comments, as “a lot of people are upset about it,” he said.

“People at West Beach are interested,” Leach said. “People at East Beach are interested. The (Spindle Rock) beach club is very interested in what’s going on.”

Harbormaster Chris Leonard has been trying to get the federal government to commit to dredging for two years now, saying that shoaling of the channel, particularly in the area near the Spindle Rock Club, has made the channel all but unnavigable by larger commercial vessels and some pleasure boats. Since the harbor was last dredged nearly 20 years ago, he said, the bottom has continued to re-shoal, and that shoaling has accelerated over the past three years or so:

“They need to make it a navigable channel and get it back to where it was,” he said Monday. “Because right now, the federal channel is like a paper road in the sense that it’s marked on a chart, but it doesn’t work because it’s filled in. Something really needs to be done.”

In a request for public comment posted on the Army Corps website, deputy district engineer Scott Acone wrote that the project will deepen the dredged portion of the channel to nine feet from mean low water. The dredged area will be 150 to 200 feet wide and will extend 9,700 feet upstream from deep water in Rhode Island Sound — basically, just off from the Nubble.

Using a dredge, workers will excavate approximately 65,000 to 75,000 cubic yards of sand from the channel, and will dump it in a rectangular area off Horseneck Beach currently 10 to 25 feet deep, measuring about 800 feet north-south by 4,000 feet east-west.

The dredging, Acone wrote, would be done between mid-September to mid-January in whatever year funds become available for the work.

On Monday, Leonard said his main concern is to beat the drum about the project itself, and not so much about the fate of the spoils. But Leach said one of his main concerns is that sand.

“I think it’s ridiculous to just take that sand and dump it in the ocean,” he said last week. “It’d be best to put it up on the beach,” he said, referring to boat beach and Cherry and Webb. “It’d help us.”

Leach said he’s already talked to highway department supervisor Chris Gonsalves, who reportedly volunteered to use backloaders to spread it up and down the beaches as needed.

“The town beach ... is a mess right now,” Leach said. “I’d be very interested in getting my hands on some.”

Apart from the dredge spoils, Leach and several other committee members are also a bit perplexed about the planned area of excavation, as they understand that much of the shoaling has occurred outside of the area marked for dredging.

He’s spread the word to the planning board and climate resiliency committee, hoping his plan for a public hearing here will gain traction.

“There’s a lot of people watching this,” he said.