ENTIAT — This Columbia River-side city will begin construction in May on the first of many long-awaited shoreline projects to restore its lost identity.

The city will advertise bids next week to add a trail, access road, restrooms and utilities to its prime stretch of waterfront along the reservoir behind Rocky Reach Dam.

City officials are hopeful that the work, together with ambitious plans for new private-investment-driven commercial main street also planned for the shoreline, will restore the vibrancy they say was lost following the town’s forced relocation around 1960 during dam construction.

The state Department of Ecology this week approved Entiat’s updated shoreline master program, which hadn’t been updated since 1975.

Susan Driver, the city’s community development director, said the updated plan won’t affect the city’s existing redevelopment plans, which are already permitted under the old guidelines.

It will subject new requests for docks and shoreline construction to stiffer new regulations, she said.

Nor, she said, would it affect the Chelan County PUD’s existing plan to add $7.1 million in new shoreline features and upgrades to Entiat’s riverside park. The work, which also predates the new regulations, is required of the utility’s federal license to operate the dam, in compensation for relocating the town decades ago.

The PUD expects to receive in the next couple of weeks a long-awaited permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to begin in-water work for a new boat launch and remove sections of asphalt roadway left over from the old town, Kris Pomianek, the PUD’s recreation resource adviser, said this morning.

Work will begin in September or October, Pomianek said, as soon as the park closes for the season. It will remain closed all of 2014 and will reopen around Memorial Day 2015.

New features will include a picnic shelter, new overnight campsite, upgraded boat launch, expanded parking for boat trailers, new trails, interpretive signing and a life-size steel sculpture by Omak-area tribal artist Smoker Marchand of Chief Silico Saska, the last chief of the Entiat people.

Christine Pratt: 665-1173

pratt@wenatcheeworld.com