Waterman Mitigation Bank facilitating long list of Kitsap environmental projects

For decades barges traveled into the Port Washington Narrows with shiploads of coal, to unload at a dock off Lebo Boulevard and the shoreline that is now part of Lions Park. The large ships would pull up onto slabs of wood called "skids," soaked in creosote and buried into the shoreline, and set against coal docks elevated above the saltwater on pilings also soaked in creosote.

The dock was used through World War II but has been closed for several generations, and the top deck was rebuilt as a fishing pier in 1976. But today, the structure is fenced off from public access, decaying and eroding on the shoreline of one of Bremerton’s most visited parks -- and has been on a city list of sites to clear for years.

It may not remain much longer, thanks to an innovative program known as a "mitigation bank" that can incentivize the work and lower the cost to cities to clean up such sites, now being done locally by a Port Orchard company.

Lions Park’s coal dock is just one of the contaminated sites around Kitsap County that need clearing and restoration, but the cost can be prohibitive for municipalities seeking solutions. Enter the wetland mitigation bank. The local organization, Waterman Mitigation Partners, is working to restore impacted wetland areas and providing private landowners, municipalities, Indigenous tribes and builders an opportunity to buy the bank’s mitigation credits to offset the environmental impacts of other projects.

The creosote pilings at Lions Park are leaching carcinogens into the saltwater where orcas, salmon and other sea-dwelling organisms reside. Hard armoring in the form of concrete blocks are set into the natural shoreline to support and protect the dock.

“Whether it's rainwater or the splash of a wave, it guts the area and it slowly erodes the beach and eventually the asphalt will start to be undermined and it creates not just ecological hazards, but public health and safety hazards and creates liabilities for everybody,” said Dustin Haydock, Waterman Mitigation Partners site assessment specialist. “The natural beach is so much more resilient and it can absorb storms, surges, king tides and rising seas and everything with it.”

There is also fill material, likely scraped off the nearby hill to extend the Lions Park waterfront, that is destroying the intertidal zone where eelgrass might be able to live, Haydock said. Less eelgrass means less food for feeder fish, which is less food for salmon, then orcas and people.

“The city expressed interest in wanting to clean this up,” Haydock said. “Once people started to learn what we're trying to do and the scale that we're trying to conduct this restoration and enhancement, lots of ideas were thrown our way from a lot of different groups – from tribes to cities, to the counties, to a lot of just private landowners.”

Waterman’s mission to clear and restore the coal dock will be only one of many upcoming projects as they partner to create healthier wetlands across Kitsap County while benefiting all parties as much as possible.

“It's looking forward to prepare for the future and to manage the present,” said Joshua Johnson, communications and public outreach representative. “We're also looking backwards to a completely different ecological paradigm where you would dump sludge in the bay and put your trash on the shore. Now we have this extremely unique opportunity to undo some of the wrongs that people actually look right past.”

Clear, restore, create credits

Rich wetland habitats and shorelines are compressed in Kitsap County’s dense landscape of highways, military facilities, cities, houses, grocery stores and more, while urban growth is increasing, said Waterman Project Manager Steve Sego. As infrastructure expands with new projects or modifications, there will be unavoidable environmental impacts that must be offset, by law, to achieve a no-net loss. That’s where a mitigation bank comes in.

The banks create wetland mitigation credits through their restorative projects, which can then be bought by parties creating an environmental impact to extract an offset of equal value. This can be a landowner trying to mitigate the impact they’ll have on the shoreline after repairing a bulkhead, for example, by helping the city afford the restoration of shoreline through the mitigation bank.

“Mitigation banking is providing ecological lift in advance of a potential impact,” Sego said. “It's simply a trading of improvements for degradation.”

Mitigation credits can be accrued by builders without a mitigation bank by restoring habitat on or nearby the impacted property, but it’s much easier to rely on a bank with connections to environmental experts and proven restorative work, said project manager Mike Stoican. Though the credit value of environmental work is arbitrary and categorized by wetland function, one credit roughly offsets one acre of impacted freshwater wetland.

The Lions Park coal docks will be one such site where the bank will mine mitigation credits through their ecological work.

Restoration efforts at the coal docks will likely see crews removing the toxic creosote-soaked skids and pilings, the concrete hard armoring and some of the fill to restore the natural shoreline, Haydock said. After it’s all done, in about two to five years, the cleared docks would look very similar to the natural shoreline on the east end of the park's shoreline.

Lions Park will be a good poster child for the restoration process, Haydock said. And because the project will be saltwater mitigation, versus freshwater, the generated credits will be much more valuable.

Credits from the project will be released gradually as objectives are completed in the process, Sego said.

A ‘win-win-win’ solution

The Bremerton Parks and Recreation Department has been looking to fund a restoration project at Lions Park for some time now, said director Jeff Elevado.

“Whenever we have an opportunity to remove creosote pilings from existing structures, we try to do that for environmental impact,” Elevado said. “It's probably a half a million dollar project and we don't have funds to do that and there's also other priority projects that require that emphasis.”

Parks and Recreation budgets are limited, said city engineer Ned Lever, so when there is funding, it’ll likely go towards infrastructure projects over stewardship projects.

The Waterman Mitigation Bank “is funded, who has the capability and capacity to deliver the project at basically no cost to the city,” Lever said. “We benefit from a more timely stewardship project being completed with our focus remaining on our other capital programs and not being  diverted to a stewardship project. So it's just a win-win-win for us.”

The U.S. Navy, the Washington State Department of Transportation, the Port of Bremerton and the Gorst Coalition are the bank's major users, Sego said. WSDOT creates impacts when working on culverts, roads and the ferry system, the Navy for military installations and municipalities working on nearshore projects.

Creating a ‘living entity’ of sites

One of the Waterman Mitigation Partners’ first sites was at Ross Creek, next to where Waterman's office now sits. They purchased the estuary land and have been expanding to the shoreline and into the critical upstream habitat to remedy a diversity of impacts from historic logging, shoreline fill and armoring, forest growth and a culverted creek.

For years, Haydock and Stoican have been scouting the Kitsap Peninsula for restoration projects, exploring old dump sites, compromised shorelines, culverts and public and private properties. After the long nights and early mornings of scouring and tromping through properties, the bank created a prospectus -- a list of properties with the best potential for ecological lift.

Because the Kitsap Peninsula lacks one major watershed, having hundreds of small creeks and rivers instead, it’s harder to have a large, concentrated watershed impact, Haydock said. Instead of adopting a large hundreds to thousand acre site, a catalog of smaller diverse sites is needed to have a successful watershed effect. Thus, the idea of an “umbrella” mitigation bank which would cover many sites like Lions Park, Ross Creek and more.

“The (sites) are all interchangeable and add value to each other, but they aren't all contiguous,” Sego said. “There are pieces that all make up the greater peninsula ecosystem that combine together to create a restoration project that we call the landscape watershed.”

The Waterman Mitigation Bank has a written agreements to restore nine major sites in their prospectus, such as the Port Gamble mill site where the bank is working to create a salt marsh intertidal zone, Wright Creek where there is a partially filled in estuary, and the Seabeck Bay.

The prospectus is just exiting the public comment and notice space where its received pretty positive feedback, Haydock said. The final prospectus draft will be reviewed by the Inter-Agency Review Team before it will go to the Mitigation Banking Instrument, a larger permitting structure, wherein they’ll be able to add more restoration sites.

Many sites did not make the cut for the current prospectus, but the bank is eyeing more, such as Blackjack Creek in Port Orchard, where shoreline armor and an overgrowth of invasive ivy could be removed, Haydock said.

For now, the bank will work to restore its current sites a couple at a time to ensure there’s credits available for purchase over the next couple decades, Haydock said. Lions Park may be among the quicker moving sites like Gamble Creek and the Ross Creek estuary.

“This is our lives, this is our kids and grandkids lives – this is our community,” Sego said. “Our goal is to create a living entity that can continue to do something pretty special.”

Once restoration is completed at one of the mitigation bank’s sites, a land trust, Indigenous tribe, or other party will be responsible for protecting that property in perpetuity to maintain its conservation.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Wetland mitigation bank offers restoration in Kitsap County