ELLSWORTH – Six weeks after the seasonal ban on dredging in the Union River has ended, city officials are waiting to see dredging equipment arrive and start working in the city harbor.

The federal ban on dredging in salmon spawning grounds, which includes the Union River, prohibits dredging activity between April 15 and Nov. 1 of each year.

Northeast Marine Construction and Towing, the Penobscot contractor hired by the city to dredge the 7.5- acre harbor, has to finish a project in Stonington before it can resume digging in Ellsworth’s harbor, Ellsworth Harbor Master Randy Heckman said Tuesday.

Members of the city’s harbor commission said Tuesday they also are waiting for Bangor engineering firm Woodard & Curran to complete a report on the harbor project.

Heckman said the company has been paid for removing 19,000 cubic yards of mud, lumber and rocks from the harbor bottom but that only 9,000 cubic yards of such material actually has been removed.

Part of the discrepancy between the two figures can be attributed to the expansion of dredged material as it is removed from the bottom and dumped into a scow to be towed to the disposal site in Union River Bay, according to city officials.

The contract between the city and Northeast Marine sets different prices for different sections of the harbor, depending on what kind of material is on the bottom, city officials have said.

The city pays the company a higher price to remove densely packed bottom with large boulders in it, for example, than it does for the company to remove soft mud.

Woodard & Curran is in the process of figuring out how much of each bottom type has been removed so that the city can determine how much credit it has with the dredging firm, members of the commission said.

The status of the engineering report, however, has no affect on Northeast Marine’s ability to resume dredging, Harbor Commission Chairman Jim Bergin said Tuesday.

Bergin and other commission members said they did not know how soon dredging in the harbor is likely to resume.

The city so far has paid Northeast Marine $266,000 of the $480,000 contract it has with the company. Federal and private surveyors have estimated the project is 30 percent complete.