MOBILE, Ala. — The City of Mobile has opened bidding for an engineering and design firm to evaluate long-term improvements to the marine infrastructure at McNally Park, home to the city’s only public boat launch into Mobile Bay. The solicitation marks the first formal step in what city officials describe as a multi-year effort to stabilize and modernize a waterfront asset that neighborhood advocates say has been allowed to deteriorate through years of deferred maintenance.
According to the request for qualifications, the city is looking for a firm to help evaluate how to best maintain the park’s boat launch, jetties and canal over the long term. A city spokesperson said the goal is to make improvements to the boat launch while also addressing sediment buildup in the canal, with the possibility that additional amenities could be added to the park through the project down the road.
McNally Park occupies a slender stretch of waterfront on the Mobile Bay side of the city’s Peninsula neighborhood, the low-lying finger of land that runs south from the downtown district between the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and the open waters of the bay. For boaters who live on the peninsula, the park’s single ramp is the closest practical access to the bay; without it, residents face a long tow down city streets or up the Eastern Shore before they can reach open water.
The launch serves a wide cross-section of the city’s boating public, from recreational anglers chasing speckled trout and redfish along the bay’s western shoreline to crabbers, kayakers and the sailing organizations that keep boats in the harbor adjacent to the park. The canal that connects the launch to open water has slowly filled with sediment over the years, a common problem for Gulf Coast boat basins where currents deposit silt and sand faster than it can be carried away.
Project Details and Timeline
The formal solicitation, titled “Request for Qualifications (RFQ): Engineering and Design Services, McNally Park Marine Improvements Project,” was posted by the city’s Programs and Project Management Department on June 22, 2026, with advertisements running in local publications on June 24, July 1 and July 8. A mandatory online question-and-answer meeting was held July 16, followed immediately by a mandatory site visit, with a representative from each prime consultant required to attend before a proposal could move forward in the evaluation process.
The structure of the solicitation is standard practice for municipal work of this kind. A qualifications-based review allows the city to rank firms on their experience with coastal engineering, dredging design and waterfront permitting before any price discussion begins, a sequence many public owners prefer for engineering services. Firms responding were expected to demonstrate familiarity with marine construction on Mobile Bay, where tidal range, soft bay-bottom sediments and the permitting web around waterfront work all shape what a project can realistically deliver.
The Programs and Project Management Department, which administers many of the city’s federally supported infrastructure efforts, will shepherd the selection. Once a firm is under contract, the typical sequence runs from condition surveys and hydrographic mapping of the canal, through alternatives analysis for the launch and jetties, to construction documents that can be competitively bid. Each of those stages requires coordination with state and federal regulators before a shovel ever touches the shoreline.
Community Advocacy Behind the Push
The Peninsula of Mobile, a community organization representing residents on the Mobile peninsula, has been pushing the city to address the issues at McNally Park. In a Facebook post, the group said its advocacy helped bring the park’s condition to the city’s attention and that both immediate and long-term solutions are now being sought to keep the boat launch safe and operational.
“PoM fights for these projects alongside Buccaneer Yacht Club, one of the two sailing organizations here in Mobile, who actively operates out of the McNally Park channel and harbor,” the group’s post said, adding that repairs to the hazardous launch, sediment dredging in the canal, jetty restructuring and conceptual designs for a potential future fishing pier will all be part of the proposals under consideration.
Buccaneer Yacht Club has been a fixture on the peninsula waterfront for decades and is one of two sailing organizations based in the city. The club’s members rely on the McNally Park channel and harbor for access, and its leadership has been among the most persistent voices describing what deferred dredging has done to the basin. When a silting channel drops below usable depth on a low tide, sailors can be stranded at the dock or forced to wait for water; powerboaters face the same math at the ramp, where trailers bottom out well before their boats do.
The combination of a neighborhood association and a yacht club working the same issue is what local officials say finally moved the project onto the city’s capital agenda. The RFQ now under way lists the full menu the advocates described — launch repair, canal dredging, jetty work and a pier concept — as elements the selected consultant will be asked to evaluate, rather than a narrow repair order for the ramp alone.
Why the Canal and Jetties Matter
Sedimentation in a tidal canal is not merely a nuisance; it is a self-reinforcing problem. As shoaling narrows the channel, current speeds drop, which lets more suspended material settle out, which narrows the channel further. On Mobile Bay, where the peninsula’s shoreline faces prevailing southerly winds that push shallow water and loose sediment into protected pockets, unmanaged basins can lose usable depth within a few boating seasons. Dredging is the only durable fix, and it must be repeated on a cycle, which is why the city’s solicitation asks a consultant to plan long-term maintenance rather than a one-time cleanup.
Any dredge plan will also have to clear a demanding permitting path. Work below the high-tide line in Alabama waters typically involves the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and, where wetlands or submerged vegetation are involved, additional state review. Dredged material must go somewhere — an upland disposal site, a beneficial-use placement along the shoreline, or open-water placement where allowed — and that decision drives both the cost and the timeline of a project of this size.
The jetties that guard the canal entrance perform their own quiet function. By sorting currents and shielding the mouth of the harbor from wake and wave energy, they protect the channel from the worst of the bay’s sediment load. When stone shifts or settles after years of storms, as advocates describe at McNally Park, the protective geometry weakens and shoaling accelerates inside. Restructuring the jetties and dredging the canal are therefore treated in the solicitation as a single engineering problem rather than two separate jobs.
A Possible Fishing Pier on the Horizon
The most speculative element of the project, and the one with the widest public appeal, is the conceptual design work for a potential future fishing pier. Mobile’s public waterfront is precious in a city hemmed in by private marinas and industrial docks, and shoreline fishing access is scarce. A pier extending from the McNally Park shoreline into the bay would give bank-bound anglers, families and elderly residents a place to fish that currently exists at few city-owned locations.
Conceptual design is the appropriate first step for such an amenity. A pier’s feasibility rests on questions a consultant must answer before any cost estimate means anything: water depth at the proposed site, bottom conditions, navigation clearances, storm-damage history and whether the structure can be permitted without interfering with the boat launch and channel operations it would sit beside. The RFQ’s decision to bundle the pier concept with the engineering work means the idea will at least get a rigorous, professional look rather than remaining a wish list item.
City officials have left the door open to additional amenities beyond the pier as the project matures, and peninsula residents have floated the kind of improvements common to waterfront parks across the Gulf Coast — better parking at the ramp, lighting, fish-cleaning stations and shaded gathering space. Any of those would be layered onto the marine work only after the core mission of the park, which is getting boats safely into Mobile Bay, is secured.
What Comes Next
With the question-and-answer session and mandatory site visit behind the process, the city’s next visible move is the selection of a consultant, followed by a survey and design phase that residents should expect to take months, not weeks. Marine engineering on the bay is deliberate work, and the sequencing the RFQ contemplates — immediate repairs to make the launch safe, dredging to restore the canal, then longer-term jetty and amenity planning — mirrors how peer cities have staged similar recoveries.
For the people who use the park, the stakes are straightforward. The ramp is the city’s only public gateway from Mobile onto the bay, and its decline has been felt by everyone from tournament bass and saltwater anglers to the sailing clubs that train young crews in the harbor. A restored launch and a dredged channel would return a working waterfront amenity that generations of Mobile boaters have counted on, and the fishing pier concept, if it survives design and funding, would add something the city has never had at that site.
The Peninsula of Mobile said in its post that both immediate and long-term solutions are now being pursued, and the structure of the solicitation backs that up: the consultant the city selects will be asked not just to draw repairs, but to produce a maintenance framework that keeps the park’s launch, canal and jetties functional for years after the construction crews leave. Residents along the peninsula, who have watched the waterline infrastructure slip for years, will be watching the selection closely.