The Tumwater Valley Golf Course was the state’s first municipal golf course to be Salmon-Safe certified, a designation it received in 2019 that means the city is significantly improving the environmental health of the 200-acre course along the Deschutes River.
But the course sits in a valley with housing developments and major roads — including I-5 — surrounding it. Its parking lot hasn’t been updated since it was built in 1969, and untreated stormwater carrying pollutants runs beneath the lot and dumps directly into the river.
According to city staff, studies have shown that chemicals found in tire dust create toxic water for coho salmon, a species that has been struggling to survive in the Deschutes. The city has received a grant from the state Department of Ecology to address those pollutants and continue meeting the requirements for its Salmon-Safe certification.
A bioretention facility will be designed and constructed to treat stormwater runoff at the golf course parking lot. City Parks Director Chuck Denney walked The Olympian through the plan, which the city hopes will be completed by next year.
Denney said when the city bought the then-private golf course in 1996, updating the stormwater system and asphalt was identified as a top priority. But they’re just now able to get to it, with the Department of Ecology grant.
Nearly 30 years later, the parking lot has cracks all over, and the storm drains are sinking into the ground.
“We don’t have any totally failed pipes right now,” Denney said. “But you know, the pipes are originally galvanized steel pipes. And they’re rotten. They’re just slowly deteriorating and collapsing. So we’re well overdue to get this set up.”
He said the plan is to create new facilities at the golf course to treat and hold water and let it filter into the ground. A new stormwater pond will be located to the right of the first tee, and a second, larger conduit will treat water at the north end of the parking lot, near the first cup.
The plan doesn’t involve adding any more parking, Denney said, but the parking lot will be redesigned to be safer and easier to access. There will be the same amount of parking, different asphalt and a new stormwater system underneath.
He said eventually the Deschutes Valley Trail will run through part of the golf course property as well, strengthening the connection between Tumwater Historical Park and Pioneer Park.
Denney said when it comes to the golf course’s Salmon-Safe Certification, the parking lot’s problems don’t have much to do with it. And there’s no longer a native salmon run in the Deschutes, he said. Their presence in the river has almost certainly always been human driven due to the presence of the waterfall downstream.
“There have been attempts for a long time to get salmon back in the river,” Denney said. “The real salmon connection here is that all of the water that goes through the golf course, through our storm drain system, eventually ends up in Budd Inlet. And that’s certainly salmon habitat. So reducing chemicals and pollutants that go into the storm system is the main goal of redoing this.”
The Tumwater City Council recently extended the Ecology grant agreement deadline from Jan. 31, 2024, to October 16, 2025. The grant totals nearly $124,000, with about $93,000 going toward design and construction. A 25% match was required from the city, according to council documents, and design and permitting is expected to cost nearly $200,000.
The Parks Department is covering the remaining design and construction costs as part of the Golf Course Parking Lot Resurfacing project outlined in the Tumwater Capital Improvement Plan for 2024-2029.
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