LCFRB Visits Ridgefield
This morning a team from the Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board met on Gee Creek to see the area the City has applied to for funding with the Clark County Clean Water Restoration Fund. The project was discussed with Bryan Kast, the Ridgefield Public Works Director. The review team from the recovery board will evaluate the projects, rank them, and eventually determine which projects get funded. Bryan made the comment that this project is one of several eroded areas the city hopes to get funding for in the future. The City should know on July 31st if the Mayor’s Meadow Project will be funded. 
The Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board leads the coordinated implementation of locally-driven salmon recovery and watershed management plans across our region to restore at-risk fish and ensure we have clean water, healthy forests, working farms, and thriving rural and urban communities into the future.
A little background:
On May 31st the City of Ridgefield submitted an application to the Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board for funding to repair a badly eroded streambank in the Mayor’s Meadow section of Abrams Park. The funding source is the Clark County Clean Water Restoration Fund. The streambank stabilization project total is $165,100. The city is requesting $130,000 in CCCWRF funds with a local match of $35,000. The funding available for 2016 is $950,000 and according to Brett Raunig of LCFRB there are $1,900,000 in funding requests. So, there is only funding for about one half the amounts requested. The acceptable projects will be ranked on July 31st and the city will know if their project will be funded. The CCCWRF funding is available for several years but the amount available will be half that of 2016 so projects will become even more competitive. There are several serious areas of stream bank erosion that were identified earlier this year. Stream bank repairs are expensive, permitting can be difficult, and it has been very hard to find funding sources for stream bank repair projects for Gee Creek. If this project is ranked high, then other similar projects on Gee Creek may be funded in the future.
