A ramp to Evanston’s only dog beach has been a long road to nowhere.
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For the thirteenth time, the city’s plan to make the heavily-frequented lakefront spot accessible to people with disabilities returned to City Council Aug. 24. After years of delays intended to refine the design and rein in exuberant costs, aldermen were left staring at a higher price tag and no ramp.
A lack of breakwall protection has led to persistent challenges for the dog beach, located just south of Clark Street Beach. Historically high water levels in Lake Michigan, accompanied by severe storms, have repeatedly submerged the area, which prompted officials to close it off from public use for several years. It reopened in October 2022 due to receding lake levels.
But its prolonged closure has meant the dog beach no longer meets Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accessibility standards. For the last four years, city staff have made various attempts to approve a ramp to the beach, ultimately to no avail.
“We had a proposal in front of us in June 2024, just short of $694,000. That proposal was not approved, resulting in another round of six council meetings, plus some additional committee meetings… to the tune of $53,000-some dollars,” said Ald. Jonathan Nieuwsma, 4th, when a new plan was back up for review during the Administration & Public Works Committee’s Aug. 24 meeting.
“So we are here today, having spent some additional time and additional money trying to bring the price down, and much to our consternation, the price has actually come up.”
The latest estimate, slated to cost $863,850, was submitted by Chicago-based contractor John Keno & Company. It was the only bid submission the city received for the project despite it being advertised to 32 vendors, according to city documents.
Two iterations of a permanent ramp on the dog beach were provided to officials, based on GEI Consultants’ 2025 study of alternate design plans to make the entrance ADA accessible. Despite the second plan being priced $90,000 higher than the first, city staff recommended officials approve it, given the extended ramp length and slope height.
The price tag exceeds Evanston’s allotted budget for the project by approximately $113,850, requiring additional funding to be budgeted from next year’s project bonds.
According to John Keno & Company’s proposal, construction to build the permanent ramp would take place next summer, assuming the city turns around paperwork quickly, in addition to receiving the necessary state and federal permitting by February 2027.
“[This project] started off on the wrong foot and stayed on the wrong foot,” said Ald. Clare Kelly, 1st, during the Monday meeting. The dog beach is located in Kelly’s ward and she has been at the helm of discussions — and further delays — for the ramp’s approval.
“Of course, I absolutely support providing ADA access to the dog beach. What I don’t support is spending nearly $900,000 on an unnecessarily elaborate structure.”
Kelly added that several residents within her ward have suggested starting a “friends of the dog beach” special interest group to pool funds together in the interest of “actually moving forward with a more appropriate access [to the dog beach] at far less money, and much quicker.”
“This should have been up four years ago. This is not a complicated project…the beach is for dogs and for people, not for walls and more concrete on the beach. This [design concept] just doesn’t meet what we want environmentally or economically,” she said.
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City engineer Laura Biggs told Council members while there are other Evanston beaches accessible to people with disabilities, the problem with the dog beach is, “depending on where the sand is, because it shifts quite a lot, [it] could be four to eight feet that [a wheelchair] has to get down to the elevation of the beach.”
Converting a currently accessible swimming beach into a designated dog beach is another option, Michael Callahan, Evanston’s deputy director of parks and recreation, told officials at the Aug. 24 meeting, but he wasn’t sure “there’s a lot of appetite to do that.”
“Another alternative, which I’m not advocating for…is that we have no dog beach at all, and that solves our ADA problem,” said Tom Suffredin, 6th. Much to the relief of several dog beach enthusiasts, that option was not further debated Monday.
Nieuwsma acknowledged that costs have gone up.
“The construction contract was in front of us, and our inability to make a decision has allowed inflation to go up by 12 percent,” he said.
“I suspect that one of the reasons we haven’t gotten as many bids, not only on this project but other projects, is that we keep moving the goalposts when we get something that we don’t like or is contrary to our expectations.”
Acknowledging that committee members were not ready to move forward with either plan, Nieuwsma moved to table the project proposal to allow for further conversations about various design iterations and costs.
Kelly said she will push to have these conversations “this week” to move quickly towards approval.
A decision on the dog beach ramp will pick back up at the Administration & Public Works Committee’s Sept. 14 meeting.