Outreach
The Similk Basis of Design Report is now available below
SRSC has submitted its final application to the State of Washington Salmon Recovery Funding Board. Project review and ranking will now take place. Decisions and awards will be announced in late September.
Basis of Design Report 6/30/22
The salmon recovery proposal is submitted to RCO. If ranked, funding will be awarded at the end of the summer.
The Basis of Design Report has been finalized and submitted with the proposal. It is now publicly available by clicking the link above. The report has an executive summary as well as preliminary design drawings and detailed technical reports as appendicies.
Second Open House 5/23/22
A second open house was held on Monday May 23rd to accommodate participants who could not get into the first open house meeting due to zoom link problems. Participation was decent, and included Commissioner Lisa Janicki from Skagit County who described the County’s support for the project. Relatively few questions and concerns were raised in this meeting, but included concerns about public access, vegetation restoration plans, and septic systems.
We have conducted a preliminary septic investigation that does not indicate any septic issues, but we are lacking information for several septic systems and will need to investigate them as well before we are confident of no impacts.
We will soon complete review of the draft preliminary designs, which will be available to the public.
Next we will continue to reach out to individuals with specific concerns as well as individuals where we need septic system information.
Artist concepts 5/11/22
This is a series of artist concepts for what we expect the Similk pocket estuary could look like several years after restoration. The extent to which vegetation will fill the marsh is uncertain, but the margins appear to be at an elevation that will support salt water emergent marsh and transitional marsh further upslope. There will be unvegetated mud flat in the deeper areas, and we expect large wood to accumulate along the northern margins of the estuary over the years. Other similar pocket estuary projects completed nearby include Turners Bay Lagoon and Crescent Harbor Lagoon.
FIRST VIRTUAL OPEN HOUSE (5/10/22)
Thank you to those who attended or attempted to attend the meeting. We apologize for the difficulties with the zoom link. We mustered the meeting with the team a half hour early to deal with any potential issues, and immediately discovered the link issue and attempted to fix it by updating the link on the website. Despite this fix, unfortunately the wrong link was either cashed in people’s browsers, or the fix took too long to percolate through the internet to be updated for everyone. The result was that the same website had different links for different people, which is why we still had a decent turn out. If it was a cashe issue, it was likely the people who have visited the website previously who encountered the problem. In the future we will be sure the website has the correct link at least a week before, and be using a different link structure to avoid the these issues out of our immediate control.
This is another reason to sign up for the email list! I emailed the correct link to the limited list I had from people who signed up. I will be sending out the link to the list the day of on future meetings. It will also be posted on this page above.
We are planning a second virtual open house for Monday May 23rd, 2022 (link at top of page).
The recording of the meeting is posted below.