Portland Watershed Restoration

The Portland Watershed and Willamette River is one of the polluted areas highlighted in our text. This are is part of the Port of Portland that was heavily polluted in the 1970's and 1980's. I have been hearing warnings of pollution and contamination in the river my entire life growing up near the city. It is nice to see that there is action being taken now to clean up this contamination in a manner that does not merely place a band aid on the wound. The government action that is being taken in Portland in response to this large contamination is a great model for other cities to follow.

City of Portland Adopts and Funds Watershed Management Plan

By Bob Sallinger

Warbler June 2006

On March 8, 2006 the Portland City Council adopted an innovative Watershed Management Plan that holds within it the potential to set the City on a course towards ecological sustainability. In Late March the Mayor presented a preliminary budget that underscores the City’s commitment to on-the-ground implementation of this plan. At a time when comprehensive environmental planning all to often falls victim to short-term political considerations, back-door compromises, and inconsistent follow-through, the City of Portland has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to restoring a landscape that nourishes both humans and wildlife and which preserves a legacy of green for generations to come.

In his Report to the Park Board, Portland Oregon, 1903, John Charles Olmsted wrote “Marked economy may also be effected by laying out parks, while land is cheap, so as to embrace streams that carry at times more water than can be taken care of by drain pipes. Thus, brooks or little rivers which would otherwise be put in large underground conduits at enormous public expense, may be attractive parkways.” More than a century later, the City of Portland has taken these prescient words to heart. The Portland Watershed Management Plan presents a vision in which stormwater is treated as an urban amenity rather than obstacle to progress. By simply recognizing that rain is best addressed where it falls rather than by piping it to someplace else, the City has committed itself to a new way of thinking with profound implications for the ecology, economy and livability of our urban landscape.

The Management Plan sets four watershed health goals for the City: improvement of hydrology, water quality, physical habitat and biodiversity. Based upon nearly a half a decade of work and a small mountain of scientific data, the plan ultimately does two things. First it models the entire urban landscape to determine how best to accomplish these four objectives in any specific location. The City now has a scientifically credible process for determining how to spend limited funds to best accomplish its environmental goals. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Plan commits the city to considering and incorporating where possible watershed protection and restoration principles at the planning stage for all city projects. The Plan recognizes that the least expensive and most effective way to restore the landscape is to do things right in the first place rather than retrofitting after environmental regulations such as the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act have been violated. This plan breaks down oft-criticized bureaucratic silos and makes environmental protection the purview of all city agencies.

The plan envisions an urban landscape in which problems such as flooding, water pollution, urban heat island effects, and lost of species diversity are addressed by reintegrating nature into the landscape. This includes not only traditional strategies such as the protection of parks and natural areas, but also a proliferation of street trees, ecoroofs, vegetative swales, rain gardens, vegetated curb extensions and the like.

The watershed approach makes economic sense. Commissioner Sam Adams, speaking before the Bureau of Environmental Services Citizens Budget Advisory Committee, noted that if we had implemented these types of projects thirty years ago, the city might very well not be spending $1.4 billion dollars today to address the combined sewer overflows (CSOs) that have turned our urban waterways into cesspools. If we fail to implement these types of projects now, the “big pipes’ that we are installing today will become obsolete within a few generations saddling our children and grandchildren with an even greater liability. The Portland city council signaled its recognition of this fact by not only holding the Portland Watershed Services Program Budget stable during 2006 but also creating a $500,000 Watershed Investment Fund to promote increased project implementation during the next year.

This plan is already more than simply aspirations on a page. Years of pilot projects have demonstrated that these projects make economic and ecological sense and simultaneously improve the livability of our City. To learn about projects already completed to date go to www.cleanrivers.org and view the 2005 Portland Watershed Annual Report. What the adoption and funding by city Council have done is ensure that these types of efforts will become the norm rather than the exception. Kudos to the BES Watershed Services Program, all the participating bureaus, the Portland City Council and myriad citizens who helped see this plan through to adoption.

http://www.audubonportland.org/conservation_advocacy/urbanconservation/watershedplan