The East Fork of the Lewis River will get half a million dollars’ worth of attention in the latest round of state funding for salmon recovery.
“These are important reaches in the East Fork, one of our highest-priority rivers,” said Jeff Breckel, executive director of the Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board.
The fish recovery board, established by the state Legislature, oversees recovery efforts for imperiled salmon and steelhead in five Southwest Washington counties. It recommends projects to the state Salmon Recovery Funding Board.
The lower Columbia earned $2.6 million of the $42.8 million awarded statewide for salmon recovery, with $510,000 going to the three projects in Clark County.
Two projects, near Lewisville and Daybreak parks, will be to plan and engineer stream restoration projects that will occur later.
The third will accomplish something physical in the river.
Clark County will use $113,000 in state money, with $20,000 of county money and donated labor, to remove 2,000 feet of a levee that runs perpendicular to the river. This will let the river reclaim a historic floodplain on the south side, improving off-channel wetland habitat and recharging the underground aquifer east of La Center.
“We will have to decide what process we will go through — whether to do the work ourselves or put out bids for the projects,” said Pat Lee, the county’s legacy lands director.
Design work
The state granted almost $400,000 for the county to design two projects where the East Fork flows through Lewisville and Daybreak parks. The county is matching the state’s contribution with $36,750 for those two projects.
The Daybreak project is to design improvements to a half-mile of the river upstream of the park, including creating two side channels north of the river and log jams in the main flow of the East Fork. At Lewisville, designers will figure out how to improve 6 acres of streambanks, a half-mile reach of the river and associated side channels.
Actually building these projects will cost more than $1 million each, Breckel said.
“There’s a fair amount of design work going on here,” he said.
