By Tim Zorn, Post-Tribune staff writer

An ambitious plan calls for transforming 21 miles of Northwest Indiana’s Lake Michigan shoreline.

Fifteen months in the making, the Marquette Plan proposes opening to the public more than three-fourths of the industry-dominated coast, from Hammond to Portage.

It includes ideas for short-term and long-range projects in five shoreline cities and involves trails, beaches, roadways and industrial land. Among the short-term projects suggested by the plan:

• In Hammond, build a trail from the Hammond Marina to Chicago.

• In Whiting, replace rubble revetment on lakefront with a more attractive walkway.

• In East Chicago, create improved access to steel plants, and obtain public access to more lakefront land. Also, improve public access to Jeorse Park.

• In Gary, re-use site of former Mitchell Generating Station; redevelop lakefront land north of Gary/Chicago Airport; complete trails in Gary Greenlink plan.

• In Portage, prepare former steel company land for public re-use.

Now it’s up to the cities and industries, according to U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky.

“If we do the lakeshore right,” Visclosky said, “people will be begging us to develop next to it.”

He is asking each of the five lakefront cities to designate its priority short-term and long-term projects from the plan.

He also wants deadlines for starting and completing each project, to ensure that the plan moves forward.

And he’s optimistic the Indiana General Assembly will include some money for the Marquette Plan in the two-year budget being prepared during the current session.

The Marquette Plan’s preparation began in October 2003, funded largely with a state grant.

Visclosky, who originally envisioned it nearly 20 years ago, proposed the plan. Supporting it were the mayors of Gary, Hammond, East Chicago, Whiting and Portage.

Only two of the original mayors — Gary’s Scott King and Portage’s Doug Olson — remain in office.

But the new mayors also support the plan’s goals, Visclosky said.

Whiting Mayor Joseph Stahura, who took office last year, is one of them.

“I think it’s a plan with a very enlightening vision,” Stahura said Friday. “It’s about time.”

“I don’t think he (Visclosky) is saying things people weren’t thinking already,” Stahura added. “He just served as the catalyst.”

When the planning process started, Visclosky said the goals were to open 75 percent of the shoreline to the public and to keep any new buildings at least 200 feet from the shore.

Currently, only about 33 percent of the shoreline has free public access; steel industries control most of it.

If all the projects in the plan are completed, more than 80 percent of the shoreline would be accessible to the public.

“I don’t care where you live or how much you make or don’t make,” Visclosky said. “You ought not to have to pay someone to get to the lake. It’s your lake.”

Government would not seize steel and oil companies’ land to open the lakeshore.

But as industries modernize and consolidate facilities, they use less land than originally.

“We are not trying a land grab,” said Gregg Calpino, a principal in JJR Inc., the Marquette Plan’s lead planning firm. “The goal is to diversify (land) uses.”

Industries and governments could work together to meet the plan’s goals, he said.

For example, planners learned from ISG-Indiana Harbor officials in East Chicago that an improved road into the plant’s eastern end would be more useful than the existing bridge on the plant’s west end.

In exchange for improving the plant’s truck access, Calpino suggested, the public could get access to the lakefront on the plant’s west end. A park there could provide spectacular views of Indiana’s and Chicago’s lakefront.

Visclosky also emphasized the proposed 200-foot setback for new buildings is a minimum. Some critics of the plan have said 200 feet is not enough to protect the shore.

The completed plan also calls for a walking and bicycling trail “contiguous to the shoreline to the extent possible.”

The word “greenway” was in the plan’s original name, implying a green corridor along the entire shore.

Greenway lands are part of the plan, Visclosky said, but it’s no longer part of the title.

One of the first short-term projects, Calpino said, could be to extend a pedestrian and bicycle trail from Hammond to Chicago’s Calumet Park, just west of the Illinois border. There, it would connect to bike trails extending up Chicago’s lakefront.

In Whiting, Stahura said his city’s first shoreline project will be to beautify the rubble-strewn shore north of the city’s lakefront park.

Whiting has funds for planning for a lakefront marina, Stahura added, but he stopped short of saying marina development is a city goal.

Financial limitations make it difficult to consider many projects, he said.

And for long-term improvements, Stahura said, Whiting will encourage BP officials to move their refinery’s water- treatment plant away from the lakefront.

In Portage, Olson has dreamed of gaining more access to Lake Michigan since he was a boy.

The city now has practically no public access to the lake, but that will change in a few years.

A new bridge over U.S. 12 into the former Midwest Steel (now U.S. Steel) plant will lead to national park land, previously owned by the steel company, on the west side of Burns Waterway. The steel company’s sewage-treatment plant, near the waterway’s mouth, will be removed after the company ties into Portage’s sewers.

A longer-term goal will be to develop access to a beach between the Burns Waterway mouth and the Port of Indiana.