The Newport Beach City Council may have ended years of back and forth over the disposal of contaminated sediment dredged from Newport Harbor after approving a plan Tuesday to use it for a pier extension project in Long Beach.
The move is similar to how the city handled the muck scooped up when the Rhine Channel was dredged in 2013. But Long Beach had no use for more sediment a few years later, when Newport Beach officials working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were planning the following round of dredging.
In 2021, the City Council approved the construction of a contained aquatic disposal facility (CAD) in Newport Harbor. That would have entailed digging a 47-foot deep hole underwater between Lido Isle and Bay Island to hold roughly 191,000 cubic yards of sediment and then burying it…