Watching Our Water Ways

Three months ago, I reported how funding problems were threatening three important salmon-restoration projects in Kitsap County. They involved Barker Creek and Chico Creek, both in Central Kitsap, and Carpenter Creek in North Kitsap. See May 27 Kitsap Sun.

Now, I am able to report good news on all three fronts.

Final pieces of the funding puzzle for the Barker Creek project were fitted into place recently, and replacement of the culvert under Tracyton Boulevard will begin next week. Timing could be better, as you can read in a story in today’s Kitsap Sun, but officials say they will do their best to protect nearby waters during construction. If the $1 million project does not get started now, funding will be lost, officials say.

A stream-restoration project on Chico Creek, where it flows through Kitsap Golf and Country Club, got under way recently. See last week’s story. The project involves carving a new meandering channel in some places and widening the existing channel in other places.

The original funding was not enough to redo the entire channel through the golf course, so the project was broken into two parts to use the existing funding. The remaining channel work is expected in 2010.

An ongoing concern is the culvert under Golf Club Road. It is now considered a third phase of the project, and a feasibility study will determine whether the culvert should be removed or whether a cheaper option will work.

Finally, funding for the Carpenter Creek bridge over the saltwater estuary near Kingston remains a bit on edge, as I described in the May 27 piece. State funding is finally in place, but the matching federal funding has become a bit shaky.

The good news is that all three versions of the federal budget — the president’s, the House’s and the Senate’s — list the Carpenter Creek project by name, which means that it is less likely to get lost in the scramble to allocate money to the Army Corps of Engineers.

“It looks very promising,” Naomi Maasberg of Cutthroats of Carpenter Creek told me this morning. “Things can still happen,” she noted. But, as things look now, construction can be expected next summer.

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Tags: Barker Creek, Carpenter Creek, Chico Creek

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 9:54 am and is filed under Puget Sound, Salmon, Streams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.