The Hagar Township Board of Trustees is moving forward with a plan to reduce erosion along the Lake Michigan shoreline at Hagar Park.

Township Supervisor Izzy DiMaggio tells us they’ve been losing part of the park to the lake.

“We’ve got a major erosion going on at the beach from the top of the bluff down to the sand, to the beach itself,” DiMaggio said. “It’s been accumulating for the past several months and now it’s just, it got to a point where it’s a dangerous situation.”

DiMaggio says visitors to the beach sometimes make it worse.

“What really makes it bad is that people, kids and adults, starting at the top and running down this bluff, and it’s straight, like a straight drop. And that is very, very dangerous. I was out there a couple times and tried to tell people, don’t do that.”

The township board this past week voted to hire Eng. Engineering and Surveying out of Grand Beach to conduct a study and make a proposal for mitigating the erosion. Plans could include the construction of a revetment or some measures at the top of the bluff to reduce runoff.

The study will cost $6,000, but DiMaggio says the mitigation measures will likely be hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The consultant study is expected to be finished in four to six weeks.