It’s a tale of two sea walls, one at Children’s Pool in La Jolla and the other along the boardwalk in Mission Beach. Both suffer from the same problem: aging and deterioration from incessant pounding by increasingly high surf.
Mission Beach Town Council is making a case that the community’s seawall is eroding and has needed repairs for years.
“There’s damage all over the wall, bad cracks, rebar showing in all kinds of areas on the boardwalk,” said MBTC spokesperson Larry Webb adding a lot of damage was done to the seawall during last winter’s storms. “There was one eight-foot area that got repaired,” he noted. “That was it. Nothing else has been repaired since then.”
The same situation exists at Children’s Pool at 850 Coast Blvd. in La Jolla, with the concrete crescent breakwater constructed in 1931 and funded by La Jolla philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps creating a safe, shallow wading area for children. The wall’s railing is heavily rusted throughout and is presently closed.
“The Children’s Pool wall is fully aged,” noted Bob Evans, president of La Jolla Parks & Beaches, Inc., which advises the City on coastal parks. “La Jolla Parks & Beaches in 2022 funded research on the City’s behalf for a local engineering company to perform a detailed structural analysis on the sea wall. Their observations were that it was beyond end-of-life (90-plus years old) and needed a complete rebuild.”
District 1 Councilmember Joe LaCava noted the budgetary outlook at present is not promising for funding in the near term for either beach seawall.
“Last week we got an update on the five-year Capital Improvement Program and the outlook for coastal resources like those (seawalls) was not included, because the City doesn’t have sufficient information as to what the scope of work, and how much it would cost,” LaCava said. He added “those kind of improvements are very important to me. I continue to work for their repair and restoration, even though we are facing a very difficult budget. So it’s unlikely anything (funding) will happen in the next year.”
“The City, in the current fiscal year budget passed last June, added $750,000 specifically for seawall repairs in Mission Beach,” said Webb. “To date, none of that has been used. I’ve been talking with parks and they’re telling me City engineers have to approve what they can do (for repairs) so it’s going to be a more involved process.”
Evans of LJPB said the group is advising against any more “band-aid type repairs and break/fix maintenance” at Children’s Pool. “We have not heard from the City of any plans they may have for any current railing repair or reopening of the sea wall,” he said. “I can only imagine, with the City’s significant lack of budget and resources, that the sea wall will be closed indefinitely.”
LJPB has been looking at other sources for funding for the Children’s Pool rebuild, such as grants and resources from other government agencies, and has included the City in some of those preliminary conversations. “We’ve also recently received some donations to our 501c3 that may be applied to near-term beautification projects at Children’s Pool,” said Evans.
