As the works start in only a few months, the next steps of the project had to be reminded.
On the organisation side, the dialogue with the Brittany région and the Ille-et-Vilaine département continues. Looking forward to increasing this partnership with Normandy on the project, a driving committee is planned for next Automn.

Before the start of the big works planned for next winter, a few preparation works have to be done such as the parking lots floor tests.

The first driving committee took place in the Joint Council's office in Ardevon.
This committee is the place where the members can focus on the planning and steps of the project.
A dedicated point has also been made on the employment aspect of the project. A convention is to be established between the joint council and the national employment agency to try to provide work in the region in the best conditions.
Both the Ille-et-Vilaine département and the Brittany région express their will to envolve themselves more in the project.

From the 3rd of January will take place the first environmental work of the project. The joint council will create, in the Moidrey Cove area, around ten bassins so that the pélodytes ponctués, a protected frog, would have a proper reproduction place. At the same time the first channels will be dredge in the same zone to experiment what will be the tidal reservoir.

Following the regional and cantonal elections, a new joint committee has been set up at the Abbaye-aux-Dames, where the Syndicat Mixte is based. Philippe Duron, president of Lower Normandy Regional Council, was elected president of the Syndicat Mixte unanimously in terms of votes cast.
 
Mr. Duron recalled how "the Region has always been a major player in developing this project, having been involved since 1997 in setting up the Syndicat Mixte with the Manche County Council.
We shall press on with conviction with this work and see the project through to a successful conclusion. The work will be accompanied by a communications effort aimed at the local inhabitants; it will also be a chance to draw attention to Mont St-Michel as a major landmark for western France, Normandy and the Manche department".
 
The councillors also elected the Syndicat Mixte board. Jean-François Le Grand, president of the Manche County Council and Bernard Cazeneuve, 1st vice-president of Lower Normandy Regional Council, are respectively 1st and 2nd vice-presidents on the board of the Syndicat Mixte. Patrick Gaulois, mayor of Mont St-Michel, is the secretary.
 
The councillors were then given a presentation of the entire project since its launch in 1995, including its wider aims, studies carried out, procedures and consultations, and the competition for an architect in charge of the works and facilities.

The operation to restore the area around Mont St-Michel is due to begin early in 2005 with the building of the dam across the Couesnon. The centrepiece of the water management side of the project, this new facility will give added power to the river as a reserve of water is held back from the incoming tide and then released again in gradual controlled flushing operations.
 
A campaign of drilling surveys has been just completed in the river bed ahead of this work. The Granville company Fondouest, specialising in the field of geological engineering, was brought in to investigate over a two week period, using onboard equipment on a floating pontoon. The idea being to determine the ground resistance before laying the foundations for the dam, to locate the rockfill laid down in the Couesnon at the time the current floodgates were built (1996/1969), and finally to determine the soil’s carrying capacity and its exact nature. The material drilled through will be used to draw up a grid of the different layers encountered, a succession of “tangue” and stone layers down to the bedrock some 15 meters underneath.
To complete its investigations, Fondouest will also be boring Moidrey Cove in a number of places. This former bend of the Couesnon is to be converted and laid out as a wetland to provide an extra reservoir of water to top up the river; none of the extracted material, some 1 250 000 m3, will be wasted, but it will be used to raise the farm land within a 5 km radius. Until the 19th century, Moidrey Cove was used as a “tanguière”* for agricultural purposes, however, over a century on, such reuse requires a close analysis of the quality of the “tangue” extracted and made available to farmers.
* area from which “tangue” (calcareous sediment) is extracted for spreading as fertiliser on arable land.

The call for applications to construct the sluices for the Couesnon dam has been launched, and the market will be allotted in the autumn. Subsequent consultations relate to the civil engineering of the dam (foundations and piers) and its seaward balcony (metal frame and wooden flooring). This lot-by-lot method of consultation (sluice gates, civil engineering, superstructures, banks of the Couesnon and guiding and dividing dyke) proposed to the Syndicat Mixte by the team of architects for the dam is a better way of stimulating competition among specialist companies than a single batch procedure would be, while also working to a similar timetable.
The dam building work will be the first to commence, early in 2005, and is due for completion in 2007.

The Antéa-HYL-BRLingénierie Group has been chosen as architect for this work, which includes dredging the Couesnon, creating the Moidrey Cove water reservoir, the channels downstream of the dam, the guiding and dividing dyke and groynes.
They have already got down to work by drawing up the transport plan for the material extracted from the Couesnon and Moidrey Cove. The plan is to be reviewed with the communes involved and the Manche County Council highways department. It aims to restrict the passage of lorries near housing and to keep them off roads used mostly by private vehicles, especially during periods of heavy traffic. In the autumn, the Syndicat Mixte will be holding meetings to present the overall works programme when this transport plan will be one of the topics to be addressed.
 
The successful group is also keen to set to work as soon as possible on making some small ponds for the population of parsley frogs (pelodytes punctatus) which have settled in Moidrey Cove. These small frogs with fossorial habits live all year round in shelters they dig in the ground and which they leave for just one month, in the spring, to breed in ponds a few dozen centimetres deep. The idea is to build new ponds to coax them out of the development area. This will leave them a year to acclimatise before work begins to dredge and flood the cove.

The successful candidate has submitted its project study file to the Syndicat Mixte. The search for a manufacturer began in June using the competitive dialogue procedure in order to fine-tune the specifications before building an initial "prototype" shuttle and going on to job lot production.