By Amanda Wilber, awilber@chronline.com, The Chronicle, 11/15/2003
Volunteers are gathering today and Sunday to plant thousands of seedling trees and bushes on a one-mile stretch of the Chehalis River near Centralia's new wastewater treatment plant.
The project is an effort to cool the river water, in part to protect the fish that make their homes there, and was made possible, in part, by a grant the Centralia City Council recently accepted from the Washington Interagency Committee for Outdoor Recreation Salmon Recovery Fund.
The city, in conjunction with the Chehalis River Basin Trust, applied for the grant for a riparian restoration project, to restore the area from an agricultural field to a mature forest by planting more than 13,000 trees and shrubs of 13 species native to the area.
"The stream needs to be a certain temperature to provide a propagation and habitat area (for fish)," said Centralia Utilities Director Dick Southworth.
The most common type of fish found in that part of the river, bull trout, requires a certain temperature in order for fish to be healthy, and to lay eggs.
"(The fish) have certain ideal temperatures," Southworth said. "The river is not meeting those temperature requirements." Other species would also be affected positively from cooler water, he said.
"We'd like to make use of this for the public as well," he said of the restoration project. "We would be proposing a nature trail along this same route." Cooler water would also allow the city to avoid purchasing chillers to cool the treated water it eventually wants to dump from the wastewater treatment plant into the river.
To purchase and install the chillers, Southworth said, would cost the city $20 million, then about $1 million a year to operate.
The project may eventually extend all the way to Fort Borst Park. Centralia's Wastewater Utility requested in the city's 2004 proposed budget that the city allocate $500,000 to buy the timber rights to the trees in Fort Borst Park from the parks department.
The items in the proposed budget won't be completed until the end of 2003, so that part of the project isn't certain yet.
"(Fort) Borst Park is getting more and more use. It's a key part of the community. We would like to insure that the trees remain there," Southworth said, adding that Fort Borst Park would be the "southern anchor" of the project.
"(Wastewater) would pay the parks department to give them additional attention, keep them in the best shape possible," he said.
Though there is "no question" the parks department already does that, Southworth would also like to see enhanced growth in the area.
The project, however, is long-term.
"It will require a lot of monitoring, 10, 12 years in monitoring ... to see the effect of the trees that we have," Southworth explained.
"It's not like tomorrow we're going to have 40- or 50-foot trees out there providing shade," he said of the seedlings to be planted at the wastewater treatment plant site.
There are about five miles of river between that site and Fort Borst Park, and Southworth said there's a possibility Centralia may eventually look to planting much of that stretch. That planting would happen as soon as the city could make it possible, rather than waiting to see if the trees near the treatment plant have any significant effect in cooling the river water.
"Because it's such a long-term thing, you can't wait. We would try to tie up that property as soon as possible. It would be much more expensive and difficult to wait," Southworth said, explaining that if the city waits the decade or more it would take to see real effects of the already-implemented parts of the project, it may lose some of its options.
"What we spend out there is going to bring as good a return to the community," he said.
Amanda Wilber covers Twin Cities government for The Chronicle. She may be reached by e-mail at awilber@chronline.com, or by telephoning 807-8241.
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