[5] Seattle Mixes Salmon With New Art Park

Seattle's new $85-million sculpture park includes a $5.7-million seawall and salmon restoration project where it steps down to meet the city's waterfront. But the question remains whether it will have any benefits for fish.

That hasn't kept the salmon hype out of the media's lovefest at the opening of the park a few days ago. Local papers included colorful diagrams of the new shallow-water habitat created below the seawall, and touted its salmon-friendliness. But nobody mentioned that $1 million of the funding came from an "earmark" to last year's Interior Department budget, thanks to Washington senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, and long-time representative Norm Dicks.

"It was a no-brainer to create a strong connection to Puget Sound," said Chris Rogers, head of capital projects for the art museum. He confirmed the earmark, and said over half the funding, about $3 million, came from the state Department of Transportation for fixing the seawall, about $500,000 came from the state's Aquatic Lands Enhancement Account, and $600,000 came from the City of Seattle.

The salmon fix for the 900-foot-long section of waterfront--which is about 10 percent of the barrier in the downtown waterfront area--included creation of a pocket beach and a shallow shelf 15 to 20 feet deep that serves to stabilize the seawall. The shelf was built by hauling in 50,000 tons of rock.

The state's Fish and Wildlife Department ponied up about $96,000 to fund "outreach and education" for the project. According to transcribed minutes from a July 2006 meeting of the Puget Sound Nearshore Partnership Executive Committee, WDFW director Jeff Koenings said "his interest in awarding funding is using the project as an education tool and monitoring for the adaptive management aspect to see if fish return."

There is a strong monitoring aspect to the project. A Wetlands Ecosystem Team from the University of Washington has already surveyed the area for fish, and plans to be back to see if juvenile salmon make use of the newly created shallow water habitat. Funding for this work came from the Green/Duwamish and Central Puget Sound Watershed Forum through a grant from the King Conservation District.

Back in 2002, the art museum applied for funding $500,000 of the restoration project's estimated $2.5 million cost through the state's Salmon Recovery Funding Board, but a technical review flagged the project as a "project of concern." Reviewers felt that something could be learned from the project, and they said it had "good visibility" and was a "good opportunity for public outreach."

But the reviewers called it a "very risky project," and hard to justify using SRFB criteria. They said it was worth pursuing, but not a good SRFB candidate. -B. R.

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