As the design process for a replacement dam at Newport’s Big Creek Reservoir continues, one of the steps has been to identify fish mitigation sites to offset the removal of the existing fish ladders at the two earthen dams.
The Newport City Council, at its meeting on Aug. 5, heard from Verena Winter, lead engineer for the Big Creek Dam Project, who provided a status report.
“As you know, the Big Creek Dam Project proposes to replace two existing dams on Big Creek with a roller-compacted concrete dam. One of the things we need to address with the new dam is fish passage,” Winter said. “We are going for a fish passage waiver for this project (because) we are not building fish passage at the site. We are mitigating elsewhere … that was decided a long time ago.”
Mayor Jan Kaplan questioned why fish mitigation is required. “From what I understand, the fish ladders haven’t been operational since the day it opened.”
“I don’t know about that, but they are not currently operational,” replied Winter.
Kaplan responded, “So we’re having to mitigate something that doesn’t exist. I’m not opposed to it, but it seems a little odd.”
Winter said, “That’s a good question, but that’s not how ODFW looks at it, or the Fish Passage Committee.” She said the project will involve some stream restoration “that will be about 0.7 miles more of Big Creek, and we’re providing habitat with that. But since it’s part of our project, we cannot get credit for the mitigation elsewhere.
“We did an analysis, and we presented to ODFW the stream lengths that we need to mitigate for,” she added. “We also need to mitigate for the native fish that are in Big Creek, which is coho salmon, winter steelhead, Pacific lamprey and coastal cutthroat trout.”
An acceptable fish mitigation site has to be within a certain proximity of the project, Winter said. “We started with 38 potential sites … and we filtered it by the species, so there were 19 sites left. And then we filtered them by length … and then we narrowed it down to five, with ODFW input mostly for the Forest Practices Act.”
Winter said they visited those five sites, which were Boone Slough, Nute Slough, Olalla Creek, Spout Creek and Wade Creek. “We collected field data and did a comparison.”
Based on that investigation, Boone Slough and Nute Slough were identified as the best locations, with Spout Creek being a third choice if the first two do not fulfill all of the requirements.
“The two projects we would like to move forward with is Boone and Nute Slough,” Winter told the council. “The plan is to replace both tide gates that are there.” Both of these are located on the Yaquina River, closer to Toledo than Newport.
A motion to approve these fish mitigation sites was unanimously approved by the city council.
Winter also told the council that their education effort, called the SOS (Save Our Supply) Campaign, is working to get information about the project out to the public.
“We created a new website (SaveOurSupplyNewport.com) so that is completely up to date. We developed some project-related information such as fliers and postcards. We also updated our educational video, which is on the website.”
In July, they conducted several dam tours for the public, “just the educate them and for us to have an opportunity to answer their questions, (and) we are about to launch some social media channels.”
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