It’s been more than two years since both the Office of Coastal Zone Management and Mattapoisett's former harbormaster Horace Field filed a complaint about Leisure Shores Marina’s disintegrating docks, but an official agreement has now been signed between marina owner Robert Ringuette and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.

The consent order, signed by Ringuette on July 30 and effective July 31, states that the marina will replace all its unencapsulated polystyrene floats, which have left Styrofoam debris on the nearby beaches and salt marsh of Brandt Island Cove.

Speaking on Sept. 9, Ringuette said new floats have already been installed and a plan submitted to the DEP to clean up any remaining Styrofoam in the area.

“We won,” Ringuette said of the agreement. “We put in all brand new PVC. That made everybody happy. We decided to do it. We did what we had to do. We did it three and a half years early.”

Winning is relative at this point. In June 2013, the Conservation Commission alerted the DEP to complaints it had received, including filling in wetlands and installing pilings without permits. DEP staff inspected the marina that month and found “severely disintegrated” floats as well as pieces of them in the water, along the beach and in the salt marsh. Staff also discovered additional finger floats and a modified main dock that were never approved. Additionally, required trash bins on the end of the docks were absent as was mandatory signage regarding pump outs.

The Conservation Commission, under the Wetlands Protection Act, required the marina to submit a notice of intent regarding the violations in July 2013 with an Aug. 26 deadline. It later reissued the order with a Sept. 23 deadline, but according to the DEP, that notice of intent was not submitted until early October and said the floats would be replaced with encapsulated floats over the course of five years.

How and when those were replaced during the five-year period was a source of contention between the commission and Ringuette as was the specific cleanup plan. Ringuette appealed at least one of the commission’s decisions regarding these issues.

A DEP site inspection in July 28 found some improvement with the signage and trash bins in place. That month, the float replacement plan was also revised to two and a half years, or Dec. 31, 2016.

The consent order says the marina must clean the “beach, bank and salt marsh” within a 2,500-foot radius within 30 days of the DEP’s approval of the plan. That plan has already been submitted, said Ringuette.

The docks have already been brought into compliance, but Ringuette must still pay $9,200 to the DEP as a penalty for the marina violations.

Korrin Petersen, the senior attorney at the Buzzards Bay Coalition, has advocated for the Conservation Commission to require replacement of the floats and a cleanup plan, so she said the DEP agreement is a win for the bay.

“It’s good news for the salt marsh,” she said. “One major concern was the smothering of the marsh with the material. There was such a large volume of it and some really big pieces.”

The floats were far from regulation as well, and Petersen called them an “anomaly in the bay.”

“That was one of the major issues that [for] all of the permits for marinas around Buzzards Bay, none of them allowed unencapsulated floats,” she said. “It was clear that they needed to upgrade their practices, which they did.”

As for the cleanup, Ringuette said he expects his employees to have it completed this month, pending the plan's approval.