The Kellogg Mount Scott watershed has been out of focus, form, and function for the last
160 years.
Over that time, knowledge and reflection has led to one singular conclusion.
Milwaukee was founded right around the same time, 1850s, and so nobody can remember a time
when Kellogg Creek actually flowed into the Willamette River.
The Kellogg Lake was created in 1858 when the original Kellogg dam was put in to power
a grist mill.
The grist mill was called the Standard Mill and it was built by one of Milwaukee's founders,
Joseph Kellogg.
The dam and the highway above it have been a part of our infrastructure here and our
life here in Milwaukee really since its founding and it has only gotten more entrenched through
the years.
The highway is still here, the mill is gone, so you kind of have to ask yourself, why do
we still have the dam?
It's complicated by several factors.
One is there's a highway running over top of it and that highway is not going anywhere.
It's complicated by the fact that fish passage here is very much impacted by hydrology.
That is the rate and speed of water movement.
It's also complicated by the fact that what's upstream of this dam is contaminated.
The lake bed has been filled through the years with all kinds of sediment runoff.
There's probably actually been illegal dumping right in the lake and finally obviously there's
a funding challenge.
Nobody has the money to do it.
Yet the vision of dam removal and a healthy, vibrant watershed lives on.
This is the beginning part of Kellogg Creek.
So what happens here affects Kellogg Creek, but not only does it affect Kellogg Creek,
is Kellogg Creek and then Mount Scott Creek.
So what we're doing here, even though here we are in Johnston City, Oregon, far away
from anything, actually impacts Astoria, Oregon, when it rains a lot is this wetland here will
absorb some of that water and it will slow down its flow.
In conversations we've had with neighbors downstream, they recognize the value of our
Harthwood Preserve and say, yeah, we know.
Knowledge came to a local church from a watershed far, far away.
We have a relationship with Bolivia, working on root causes of poverty and hunger and particularly
water is what they have focused on.
So each of our churches decided to investigate that.
And so we thought about doing the Willamette or the Columbia.
And then somehow somebody mentioned, well, you know, we have a creek on the back of our
property here.
And then we started saying, you know, we need to do something about that.
We also found out then that the city was doing, thinking about removal of the dam.
For about 14 years the city of Milwaukee has been working with state and other local jurisdictions
to find ways to improve our local natural habitat and integrate it with a downtown plan that
will really promote Milwaukee as a place where we can all live, work and play and have access
to natural open spaces.
By removing the Kellogg Dam, we do all of that.
There's only one map that shows what this area would have looked like before the dam
was built in 1858.
And it's an original survey that was done in 1851 when Milwaukee was first being settled.
And it depicts Kellogg Creek as a meandering, free-flowing creek.
We're standing under McLaughlin Boulevard.
And only because the water's so low can I do this.
But what people, I think, don't realize is the opportunity here to be able to connect
downtown Milwaukee to the east and the Willamette River and Riverfront Park to the west with
this project.
There is about 20 feet of clear space above me from where I'm standing.
This floor is actually going to lower when we do this dam removal project.
The amount of space side to side and top to bottom is going to allow for us to put an
under crossing in here so that the long, awaited dream of being able to connect downtown Milwaukee
to their riverfront without having to cross McLaughlin Boulevard in the traffic is part
of what this project is trying to do.
This is a project that really stands out in the region as one that is going to provide
a multitude of benefits, ecological, social, public health related, cultural.
We're extremely excited at the Watershed Council that the city of Milwaukee has been
moving forward toward removing the dam.
And we are eager to do our part to be a partner in any way that we can.
Some people in our church are not because they remember the history of the lake and
when it was more pristine.
Based on interviews that I conducted with Milwaukee citizens, I found that during the
20s, 30s, and 40s Milwaukee citizens used and recreated on the lake quite extensively.
They ice skated on it, they fished in it, they swam in it.
Most of the private properties that surround the lake had docks that went out into the
lake and people used those all summer long and really shared a lot of great memories
on Kellogg Lake.
People thought that the lake, when we started talking about this in church, was part of
the sewer system that was the holding tank.
Mid-1950s, there was a real estate firm in Milwaukee called Kroenberg Brothers and they
struck a deal with a gravel company that was on the Willamette River where they would
have the gravel company dump refuse gravel, gravel that couldn't be sold because of its
size, straight into Kellogg Lake and that dumping spurred a period of kind of community
disgust and neglect towards the lake.
The dumping went on for about one decade while the lake's immediate neighbors tried
extensively to stop the dumping.
They took the Kroenberg Brothers to County Court and then eventually to State Court and
after about 10 years they did stop the dumping but not before over 50,000 cubic yards of
refuse was dumped into the south shore of Kellogg Lake.
Here we are in the banks of the Kellogg Lake, only a stone's throw from downtown Milwaukee
and you really wouldn't know this place is here unless you actually got down and tried
to fight your way towards the banks to the shore and this is really kind of illustrates
the opportunity we have.
There's really no way to get down to the water here.
So I'm facing the main stem Willamette River and if we're thinking like a fish here you've
got Kellogg Creek coming out behind me passing over the small dam and this dam has created
a real impediment for native fish juveniles to take shelter in areas like Kellogg Creek
and from the perspective of Willamette Riverkeeper, it makes a lot of sense to take this dam out.
This is the kind of project that can yield tremendous benefits for native fish like
coho and other species that need that connection, that natural connection that has been around
for millennia from big rivers to their tributaries and the tributary like Kellogg Creek and the
connectivity to the Willamette could be essential to a range of species.
A large, shallow, warm, basically mud puddle and it became impossible for a fish to make
their way through this into the upper reaches particularly with an abundance of non-native
fish that had taken root here in the warm water and we lost our fisheries.
This area, based on the interviews, this area was predominantly agriculture all up and down
Lake Road and agriculture at that time used highly toxic pesticides like DDT.
For well over 20 years there's been organizations working upstream from Kellogg to provide restoration
efforts so that we can eventually get fish back up into those streams and provide spaces
for people to recreate and have this natural space in harmony with our urban surroundings.
It's sad to see our older friends go because it's probably 6 or 8 years old and we put
it in.
We had a pond here with water that was not really good for much other than boating on
once in a while.
It was very warm, no trees around, very little habitat.
So about 10 years ago the county and the state came in and rehabbed it, removed the dam and
with Solve's help and Friends of Trees help has replanted what you now see behind me.
It's an area that is cool in the summer.
It certainly has made the water temperature better and better for fish.
There used to be a dam right behind us, a big earthen dam that wasn't in very good repair
so it either needed to be repaired or come out and so the county decided to take it out.
So the surface water technician at the time, Karen Streeter, just worked with our engineer
to design a project that would remove the dam.
In 2003, Clackamas County produced a documentary about the removal of the 122nd Avenue Dam.
Welcome you first to the Mt. Scott Creek Dam Removal Project site.
This is a great site where we're standing right now was the dam.
There used to be a dam that went across that way.
It was an earthen dam constructed in the mid-1950s for irrigation and livestock watering purposes.
Friends of Trees was excited to be a part of this project here at this dam removal site.
We planted during 2003 with the help of dozens of volunteers from the community.
This has been a really successful example of what could be done at the mouth of Kellogg Creek.
Just up here, just beyond the bridge up there, which was 10 years ago and the trees are looking
pretty good.
Pretty good, yeah.
Seems fairly successful.
Yeah, I think so.
It looks really good.
I think they actually added some boulders too and some woody debris for some complexity.
Yeah.
Yeah, so they, not only riparian habitat but also in-stream habitat was added as well.
So and it does, it looks really good.
It's hard to believe this is in the middle of a city, actually.
Now we would have been about waist deep in water, maybe chest deep when the dam was here.
So it would have been silt and sediment, mud, muck, warm water.
That was a problem for water quality because then the water was very shallow going through
the pond area and the sun would heat that shallow water up to get very warm and then
the fish that lived downstream, they were not very happy in that very warm water because
salmon need cold, clean water in order to survive.
So by removing the dam and reconstructing the stream channel through the site, we were
able to reduce the water temperature by almost 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's a lot for one project.
And by reconstructing the stream channel through here, we were able to make sure that the fish
could swim up past this site into the spawning and burying habitat above.
I'd like to see us, at some point in time, have fish return to the area and spawn here.
There are other places in Clackamas County that fish are spawning in backyards.
There's no reason it can't happen here.
But the Kellogg dam would have to be removed so fish could get back up here to where they
were.
But the good news is that we can bring them back.
We can restore that.
The reason I'm quite excited about it is because I think you all know that I have been kind
of obliquely referring to this idea that we've been talking about for several months now
as a roadmap for getting all the way through the Kellogg-Farcoho initiative.
Portland Harbor is a super fun process under which those who damage the ecosystem or the
harbor, those who polluted it, will have to make some recompense to the public for damages
that were created.
One of the things that industry is going to have to do as part of Superfund is a natural
resource damage assessment, sometimes referred to as NERDA.
What that is is essentially a requirement that they mitigate for the negative impacts
that the pollution has had over time on the river, on the different values, fish and wildlife.
They're in the process now of figuring out how much that's going to be and trying to
affortion it.
What that will be used for is restoration sites up and down the river.
To calculate debit or damage or injury to natural resources and to equate that to amount
of restoration that it's going to take to bring those species back to where they were
before the contamination.
We're basically right up here at the top of the feasibility.
We're just starting to look at this site to see can we do it?
Can we finance it?
That's what Wildlands brings to the table is financing and also all the expertise that
I talked about earlier, so design and permitting and entitlements and all of our previous expertise
from all of our other projects.
Wildlands is an organization that's privately owned and operated and they are coming in
at no cost to the city except for some staff time to execute this project.
Now what the credits are depend on what the resources in this particular case, the credits
are called DSAs and so the people who need the restoration are told that they need X
amount of DSAs and we are told how many DSAs a restoration project will generate and that
way we know how many DSAs we have to sell if we do what we said we were going to do
and create the habitat that we have designed and proposed.
Next is actually what funds the monitoring and maintenance forever.
But there has been some very nice floodplain reconnection and riparian restoration that's
been done over the years and that's the kind of thing that could happen on Kellogg Creek
to great benefit.
As I said in both of these systems we need more work over time but Johnson Creek provides
a really nice example of the kind of thing that could be accomplished on Kellogg Creek.
We're here with the confluence of the Willamette River and the Columbia and the Columbia of
course comes down from British Columbia for over 1200 miles.
It used to be the biggest fishery in the world so I think in the Kellogg watershed it's not
only our opportunity but I think it's our obligation to send down cold, clean, salmon
filled waters to the Willamette and thus the Columbia.
Why do we want fish back in the Kellogg Creek system?
Well fish are an important indicator species in the Northwest.
They're part of the food chain that covers all the way from the small invertebrates living
in the bottom of the stream up to the large birds and even some of the larger predators.
Making investments like this are really a way of saying to the future this is who we
are as a people.
We care about our natural places, we want a space for nature in our communities, in
our daily lives.
This project needs to happen and needs to happen soon.
Not only will we restore fish habitat here in Milwaukee but it'll provide habitat up
to 27 miles upstream.
We'll restore areas that people can enjoy and recreate in and link a great vibrant economic
downtown but what's really important, what we are doing here is we are giving a gift
to our future generations, to our children.
What I love about this project is what we've done but the fact that I cannot tell where
the borders are between our church and the community anymore.
What's the community, what's the church, it's all blended together and we're all working
to try to make creation back to what it was instead of a mess.
Now is the time for us to come together and seize the opportunity.
Restoration is in our grasp.
Just fail the watershed, un-dammit.
