Nineteen state tribes, including the Muckleshoots, will receive grants totaling nearly $2 million for on-the-ground projects to protect and preserve water quality and salmon habitat in the Puget Sound region.
The grants support the Puget Sound Partnership’s 2020 Action Agenda.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in partnership with the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission made the grant announcement on the banks of Hansen Creek where the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe will
showcase just one of the 19 habitat restoration projects. The Upper Skagit Tribe will receive $105,000 to help restore 140 acres of habitat around the creek, a tributary to the Skagit River near the Tribe’s
reservation.
“Salmon habitat has suffered centuries of abuse,” said Billy Frank Jr., Chairman of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission. “With the help of these EPA grants, the tribes are undoing that damage one step at a time. We all have to work together to get Puget Sound healthy again.”
Puget Sound chinook and steelhead are listed as “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act, and Skagit Coho are listed by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife as a species of concern.
“We are very pleased to award these grants and help these tribes continue to do what they have done for centuries: care for their traditional lands in a sustainable way, said Michelle Pirzadeh, EPA’s
Acting Regional Administrator in Seattle. “We’ve heard the tribes call for action to protect Puget Sound. These grants will directly support the tribes’ ‘shovel ready’ projects that will produce very tangible environmental results.”
Using the grants, tribes will take on a variety of projects including: taking a systematic inventory of fish-blocking culverts; restoring connectivity to floodplains and returning tidal flow to estuaries and
building engineered logjams to create covered deep pools where Chinook salmon hold before spawning.
Among the tribes who will receive an approximate $100,000 grant will be the Muckleshoots.
The Muckleshoots’ brief project description follows:
A technical study will be conducted to determine the feasibility and design options for increasing the availability of pool habitat, promote groundwater exchange/hyporheic flow, and expand thermal refuge area at selected tributary mouths and other locations in the Sammamish River to alleviate poor migration conditions for adult chinook and other salmon. The study will include delineation of existing thermal refuge areas and preparation of site specific habitat restoration designs for priority areas.
