From the President
By Dick Knight

McElroy Slough! I know people get tired of me harping on this project but I am going to talk about it one more time. The main reason I am on this now is that if this project is not started by June of 2005, Skagit County will lose $380,000. This grant was awarded by the Salmon Recovery Funding Board (SRFB) in 2000 for the amount of $460,000. Normally these grants run for 5 years and that deadline is just about upon us. $80,000 of the grant has been spent on design, permitting, working with the community of Blanchard and baseline groundwater monitoring. When you look at how the project was planned, it was a textbook example of how to do a project.

Allow me to give a bit of history as I remember it. There has been substantial work done on the stream system over the past 10 years using other funding sources prior to the SRFB coming into existence. Jobs for the Environment, U.S. Fish and Wildlife and Regional Fisheries Enhancement Group funding was used. SFEG did riparian plantings along Harrison and Colony Creeks in the 1990's and restored lower reaches of Harrison and Colony Creeks by taking them out of ditches and putting them back into their historic paths. Prior to that, a former SFEG board member, Kevin Morse, was involved in discussions with the rest of the community to do a fish enhancement project and also help alleviate a flooding problem they have with McElroy Slough. Recently, the Upper Skagit Tribe completed a project on West Fork of Colony Creek consisting of putting a large number of logs back into the stream after they were moved high on the banks due to a blowout of a beaver dam. So, as you can see there has been substantial effort and money put into this system. All of this work was done with the thought in mind that a Self-Regulating Tide Gate would be eventually placed in the system to increase fish use.

In 2000, the SRFB grant was awarded to the project with Skagit County as a partner. All was ready to begin the project in 2002 and at the last minute a hold was put on the project by Skagit County. The reason for the hold was so more modeling could be done. I have not seen any results of that modeling nor do I know if it was ever completed. Up to this point there were no adverse comments about the project, certainly none from the community of Blanchard. All of a sudden the McElroy project became linked to the Edison Slough tide gate, a project done in 1998. The Edison project has some issues connected to it but these issues are confined to the Edison area. The fact became very clear that if the issues with Edison Slough were not solved, McElroy would never happen.

Even at this late date I would hope some movement on this project could allow it to move forward and benefit the Blanchard community and the fish trying to get into the Colony Creek system. It is a shame not to allow all the work done by so many different parties to give maximum benefit to people and fish.