Eco-activists Using Grant Money to Improve Watersheds

By Joe Fitzgibbon, The Oregonian

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Bruce Beattie keeps one eye on the murky waters of the Columbia Slough as he helps Marjorie Kavanagh ease from the slippery wooden dock into her yellow kayak. "There's been a lot of rain and snow lately; so this will be a good time for us to look for cottonwoods and other debris that's fallen or been thrown into the water," Beattie says before dropping into his own red watercraft. "We've found nearly everything you can imagine out here, from a bicycle to a beer keg."

The pair, well-outfitted in rain gear and toting recycle bins, are members of Eyes on the Slough, volunteers who patrol sections of the 18-mile waterway that meanders from the Fairview area to Kelley Point Park. Each month, they scour the slough, picking up trash, reporting illegal dump sites, tracking wildlife and monitoring water temperatures and conditions.

Eyes on the Slough is one of 167 public-directed Community Watershed Stewardship Projects, that are funded by the city to restore degraded parks, school grounds, waterways and open spaces.

"They started off mostly as feel-good projects," says Barry Messer, assistant professor of urban studies at Portland State University, who has been monitoring the program and involving his graduate students since its inception in 1994. "But now they are beginning to reach a critical mass and have an impact on air and water quality."

To that end, the city is doubling its grant allocations from $5,000 to $10,000 and making $96,000 available for new and continuing watershed projects this spring.

"We're seeing far more complicated and involved proposals than when we started," Jennifer Devlin, program coordinator with the Bureau of Environmental Services, says. "We want to assist as many groups as we can who want to make dramatic changes in the watershed."

The deadline for submitting a plan is Friday, April 3.

During the past 15 years, the city's environmental agency has teamed up with PSU and AmeriCorps Northwest Service Academy and given out more than $700,000 in grants, along with technical assistance and expertise, to churches, businesses, community organizations and neighborhood groups.

Ed Kerns, a Lents community activist, tops the charts with seven grants, which, he says, he and a loyal core of volunteers used to plant tens of thousands of trees along the Springwater Corridor. An unexpected benefit was the creation of a new generation of young environmentalists.   "We've had over 100 kids working in the dirt, most who had never planted anything before," Kerns says. "I saw their sense of satisfaction — their sense of ownership — and now know that my passion for saving the environment has been multiplied with them."

Other city projects have varied from backyard habitat-restoration projects and schoolyard bioswales to eco-roofs and classes in pesticide education.

Steve Stevens and a dozen St. Francis of Assisi church volunteers in Southeast Portland used a grant to divert thousands of gallons of storm-water runoff from the roofs of the church and a former school building into drywells and out of the city's sewer system.

"We were even able to use a little of the money to hire several homeless from our soup kitchen to help out," Stevens says. "By some measures it may seem like a small project, but you added this to all the churches in the city and you'd have a big, big number."

Carl Axelsen, who grew up near Multnomah Village and coordinates the Tryon Creek Watershed Council, calls the $10,000 his organization will be spending as good for the environment and local economy. For months, residents and watershed mentors have toiled to remove invasive species, plant wildlife-friendly shrubs and trees and to meet with other Southwest residents to help them create backyard ecosystems.

"The area is becoming more and more attractive for wildlife and people," Axelsen says. "A pleasant surprise has been to watch neighbors and homeowners working together to make the area more livable."

As Beattie and Kavanagh fished out a rubber glove and a couple of beer cans from the slough, they laughed in disbelief.

"Makes you wonder what else will float up one of these days," Kavanagh says.