Almost a decade later, park opens to the public

It’s taken nine years and more than half a million dollars, but June White Decker Park on Destin’s Restaurant Row is now open to the public.

“I didn’t think I’d ever get to say that,” Okaloosa County Beach Projects Coordinator Jim Trifilio told the county’s Tourist Development Council at its April 23 meeting.

The TDC held the official ribbon-cutting on May 1, three weeks after the city granted the park facilities a certificate of occupancy.

“We started this process nine years ago,” TDC Executive Darrel Jones said at the April 23 meeting. “You never knew it would take that long to put in concrete, would you?”

“It’s a bathroom, for Pete’s sake,” TDC member Ken Paine said. “An expensive bathroom.”

The original design for the park had included a picnic pavilion as well as a restroom and dune walkovers, but Tom Becnel, the developer of the neighboring Silver Shells condominiums, told the TDC in 2002 that the design violated the Silver Shells development agreement by placing some construction in the Restaurant Row right of way.

Moving the project further down the beach triggered stricter environmental requirements, to the point the TDC believed it would be impossible to build. Finally, the TDC decided to take a chance and applied for a state permit in early 2003.

What followed were over a year of permit reviews, requested redesigns — including deleting the picnic pavilion because it stood too close to the water — and delays, which some TDC members blamed on the consulting engineer not actively pursuing the permit. In 2004, the state finally gave the TDC the go-ahead.

In 2005, when the TDC solicited bids from contractors, a new problem emerged: Nobody bid. A second round generated one proposal from Decks N Such for $501,785, which the TDC accepted. Work began in 2006, but instead of finishing that summer, it dragged on into 2008.

The park’s name commemorates the former owner of June’s Dunes, a beloved Restaurant Row breakfast place that was replaced by condos a few years ago.

Along with the park’s stretch of beachfront, the grass walkway east behind Silver Shells is open to the public, as are Silver Shells’ five dune walkovers. City officials have said the public can use them to walk down to the Gulf, even though the walkover closest to the road now leads to a keep out sign planted in the sand.

Log photo by KATHY HARRISON
HIT THE DECKER: After years of delays, June White Decker Park is finally open. Mayor Craig Barker, Council member Sam Seevers, Okaloosa County Commissioner James Campbell and City Manager Greg Kisela, and others officially, opened the beachfront park Thursday morning.