Washington’s Skagit River Valley Stimulus Project Restoration Nears Completion

A multi-year effort to restore tidal marsh habitat in Washington’s Skagit River Delta, funded through the federal economic stimulus package, is nearing completion — capping a project that brought together two groups more accustomed to fighting each other than collaborating: farmers and fisheries advocates.

A Stimulus Project With an Unusual Coalition

The project, centered on a site known as Fisher Slough in Skagit County, was among the earliest habitat restoration efforts funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — the stimulus package passed in the depths of the financial crisis to jump-start the economy through infrastructure and public works spending. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration selected the project for funding specifically because it was, in bureaucratic terms, “shovel-ready” — engineered and ready to break ground quickly enough to create jobs when the economy needed them most.

What sets Fisher Slough apart from many stimulus-funded projects is the coalition behind it. The Skagit Delta has a long history of tension between the agricultural community, which relies on diking and drainage infrastructure to keep farmland dry and productive, and fisheries advocates working to restore the tidal marsh habitat that endangered salmon depend on — habitat that diking eliminated across much of the delta over the past century. At Fisher Slough, The Nature Conservancy worked directly with Skagit County’s Dike District 3 and Drainage District 17, the very agricultural drainage authorities that might otherwise have opposed a marsh restoration project, to design something that could serve both goals simultaneously. “This project demonstrates the power of partnership,” Karen Anderson, Washington director of The Nature Conservancy, said when the funding was first announced.

What the Project Actually Restores

The restoration work has unfolded in three distinct phases. The first, replacing the site’s aging floodgates, was completed in the summer of 2009. The second phase, relocating a large drainage channel known locally as the Big Ditch, took place in 2010. The final phase — setting back the site’s south levee and completing the marsh restoration itself — has stretched across 2010 and 2011.

Once finished, the project will restore roughly 60 acres of freshwater tidal marsh, reconnecting a natural stream and floodplain system that had been cut off from tidal influence for generations. Beyond the marsh acreage itself, the restoration also improves fish passage to some 15 miles of high-quality salmon spawning and rearing habitat upstream — a significant expansion of usable habitat for a species whose Puget Sound populations remain listed under the Endangered Species Act.

The flood-control benefits are just as central to the project’s design as the habitat restoration. By restoring natural floodplain function to the site, engineers expect the project to meaningfully reduce flood risk across the surrounding 23-square-mile watershed — directly benefiting the same farming community whose drainage districts partnered on the project in the first place.

A Model NOAA Has Continued to Point To

Fisher Slough was one of 125 coastal habitat restoration projects NOAA funded nationwide through the 2009 Recovery Act, part of a $167 million investment the agency made in shovel-ready coastal restoration work during the recession, according to NOAA Fisheries’ own accounting of the program. Nationally, those projects supported an estimated 2,280 jobs and restored more than 25,000 acres of habitat, figures NOAA has cited as evidence that habitat restoration can double as genuine economic stimulus, not simply an environmental expenditure competing against job-creating infrastructure spending.

For the Skagit Delta specifically, locally sourced estimates project the completed Fisher Slough restoration could deliver as much as $21 million in long-term benefits over the coming decades, primarily through reduced flood damage and lower drainage maintenance costs for the surrounding farmland — a bottom-line case for restoration that has helped bring skeptical agricultural interests to the table in a way purely conservation-focused arguments might not have.

What Comes Next for the Skagit

Fisher Slough is very much a piece of a much larger puzzle. The Skagit Chinook Recovery Plan, the region’s guiding blueprint for salmon habitat restoration, calls for restoring roughly 2,700 acres of estuary habitat across the delta in order to give Puget Sound Chinook salmon populations a real chance at recovery — meaning Fisher Slough’s 60 acres, while a meaningful and hard-won achievement, represents only a fraction of the total restoration work regional fisheries managers say still needs to happen.

For now, though, project partners are treating Fisher Slough’s near-completion as proof of concept: that farmers and fisheries advocates, given the right project design and enough patience to work through old tensions, can build something that leaves both the local economy and the region’s salmon runs better off than before.

For more on how stimulus-era environmental projects intersected with local economies, see our related coverage in Environment.