A small portion of the lower Newaukum River is set to be a lot more cozy for the salmon and other aquatic species that call it home after the Chehalis Basin Board approved funding for a habitat restoration project near Kirkland Road south of Chehalis at its May 1 meeting.
The grant of $880,000 will pay for the engineering and planning costs of the proposed project, which will likely need another $2 to $3 million in funding in the future to pay for construction.
The end goal of the project is to improve conditions for salmon along roughly a mile of the lower Newaukum river.
While the project will likely benefit many species, spring Chinook, which are among the most vulnerable species in the state, are the main focus.
The project is something new for the Office of the Chehalis Basin (OCB) as it combines conventional restoration work in the river with a land easement that ensures that the surrounding land remains farmland and habitat for future generations. It protects the river from being surrounded by more intense development.
As a result, the money is split two ways with a portion going to Lewis Conservation District, which will do the material restoration work in and around the river, and a portion going to the Washington Farmland Trust, which will work on the easement.
It's the first time the Office of the Chehalis Basin and the Washington Farmland Trust have worked together in this way. The trust's Senior Conservation Manager Nate Lewis said he hopes it's just the beginning.
“I think we're asking the OCB to think outside the box a little bit,” Lewis said. “I think they've always wanted to prioritize the values of agriculture but have not quite known how.”
An easement allows a non-owner to purchase certain rights to a piece of land from the owner. It doesn’t change the ownership, but it does put certain restrictions on how the land is used.
The trust will acquire the development rights and add other conditions, such as requiring the land to be actively farmed. Since owning and working the land now comes with conditions, the land loses some value. Lewis said to balance it out financially the trust generally pays an amount for the easement equal to the difference between the land’s value before the easement and the land’s value after the easement is created or, in other words, the value lost in the process.
The easement is not just a stake in the property. Lewis said the more important consideration is that it makes changes to the title that are enforced by zoning laws and other legal procedures. That means even with a different landowner or a new operator of the land trust, those conditions will still be enforced. That’s what makes it a reliable way to keep farmland as farmland indefinitely.
The trust has been working to preserve farmland since its creation in 1999. The organization first did this by simply purchasing a piece of land, but today it more often purchases farmland easements.
Lewis said a major goal of the project, in addition to the easement, is to have a strong relationship with the land owner and build trust with the community in the Chehalis Basin.
“The landowners in the Chehalis Basin have been somewhat conservation-skeptical, not because there's anything wrong with conservation, but it hasn’t in the past taken into account that farms need some flexibility to be viable. That's kind of what we're trying to do here,” Lewis said. “If we can show the community that, it will build goodwill and sort of hopefully solicit more landowners to step forward and say they’ll sign on for it,”
It’s also a big moment for the trust to show that farmland and habitat can work hand in hand. Lewis added that the two sides are often framed as diametrically opposed to one another, but insists that they have a lot of potential to benefit each other.
“If you only approach the project from the farmland perspective, you miss out on the habitat, and if you approach it only from the habitat perspective, you miss out on the farmland,” Lewis said. “You don't need to choose one or the other. Both can exist simultaneously.”
On the restoration side of the project, the Lewis Conservation District is leading the way. The conservation district, which has existed in the area since the 1940s, completes a variety of conservation work mostly split between supporting local farms and restoring river habitats.
The restoration will focus on making the nearly mile-long stretch of the lower Newaukum more habitable for spring Chinook by making the water cooler and cleaner, providing shelter and expanding habitat.
The changes also stand to benefit many other species, big and small. Nikki Atkins, manager with the conservation district, said that it can act as a sort of wildlife highway, giving animals a better route to move around.
“We're creating habitat features targeted toward spring Chinook, which will benefit other salmon species at the same time,” Atkins said.
Planning for the project is still happening, which means nothing is set in stone, but Atkins said the district plans to make changes in three main ways.
First is work on the banks of the river. That means planting native species of trees, bushes and other plants that will shade the river to keep it cool, add shelter and nutrition to the stream, and help prevent erosion with root systems.
Next, the district will install wood structures in the stream that will simulate fallen logs and other debris that slow the river, which could help with flooding problems and provide shelter and cooler pools for fish. Atkins calls them “hotels for fish.”
“They have an area where they can go to get out of predation, and then in high flood events will slow the erosion down,” Atkins said.
The final part of the project is building small channels. Atkins says they do this in two ways. The first is restoring small streams of the river that existed in the past. These streams could fill with water when levels rise in the spring and provide shortcuts and slower moving streams for fish to hang out in. The other is dead-end channels that give more places for water to go and also more space for fish.
The team from the Lewis Conservation District hopes to start the project in the summer of 2026 and finish it by the end of the summer of 2027.
Work in the river is limited by many factors such as permitting timelines as well as work windows that restrict construction and improvements made in a river to avoid interrupting fish passage. Atkins said the work window for this section of the lower Newaukum is roughly from the first of July to the middle or end of August,meaning construction has two months or less to complete work each year.
This project is just one of many fish habitat projects that make up the Aquatic Species Restoration Program funded by the Office of the Chehalis Basin. The program is a long-term plan for restoring fish habitat, which is one of the office's two main goals, with the other being flood reduction.
The Office of the Chehalis Basin received $75 million from the state Legislature last month to continue its work into the next biennium.
