South Portland does not plan on rebuilding the iconic fishing shacks at Willard Beach that were swept into the sea during a severe winter storm in January.

Rebuilding the fishing shacks, first built in the 1800s, was supported by many residents at a workshop on storm damage in February.

“At the time,” City Manager Scott Morelli said at Tuesday’s meeting, “there was interest by some members of the public to have the shacks rebuilt, but there were concerns that both the state and our code office had related to the ability to do that based on the National Flood Insurance program restrictions and shoreland zoning and requirements for how things need to be built in flood areas.”

The city contracted Sebago Technics to survey the area for potential locations to rebuild them, including their original location. A memo from the city’s code enforcement director, Barb Skelton, that outlines the difficulties of doing so was presented to the City Council at its meeting on Tuesday.

“The shacks were clearly in a flood velocity zone,” Skelton said in the memo. “When comparing the plans, it becomes clear that the structures cannot be built in their former location without costly engineering to design them because they would need to be elevated to the base flood level of 12 feet plus 1 foot.”

“In other words, they can’t be rebuilt as they were,” Morelli said after reading an excerpt of the memo aloud. “They’d have to be rebuilt differently and to flood standards so, at this time, staff is not going to be moving forward with any sort of recommendation or proposal to do any sort of rebuild of the shacks.”