The County installed a bottomless culvert in our road this summer. The big concrete rectangle that is designed to help fish pass. They did some other work to restore the little seasonal creek that runs through the culvert. It blocked traffic for 2 weeks and the whole project was about 6 weeks long. I checked with King County and the total cost was about 1.8 million to do this. The seasonal creek dries up in May and starts up again in the fall. If you walk about 100 yards below the culvert the blackberries, brush etc are so thick no fish bigger than a minnow could get through even if that. There really is not a creek here the water stays on the surface and jsut kind of flatens out and works through a couple of hundred yards of brush. It then flows about a mile to the Snoqualmie river. They are many more obsatacles like this. There is a 90+ year old man who grew up here and said that he had never seen a fish of any type in this little 2' wide creek and he played it it as a kid. Upstream from this new culvert the drop is such that no fish could get up it either.

I had to go through a 1 year enviornemental review to buy my place near this creek 12 years ago. The previous owner that sold to me had to pay $150K in studies to mitigate wetlands etc. for people to build on the 4 ,10 acre lots he was selling. Mine has a similar seasonal creek through one corner. No fish in it after extensive review. It seemed to me at the time the county and state people involved were young and idealistic they had little working knowledge of what the systems fish potential past or present is or was. It seemed like they had an agenda to preserve as much as they could . I am all for that for the most part. My concern is that it seems to me they spent close to $2 million to to protect what? The bio filtration of run off etc was just fine in this spot. If fish ever spwned here none of the locals seem to know about it. I would think $2 million could have done much more else where. It was more than $2 million by the way because I saw 3 similar projects along the Snoqualmie this summer.

Any one know if this is unique to King County or are other areas this crazy with our tax dollars.

I get to go in later this year for a hearing on my property taxes it should be interesting.

Try to find a large metropolitan area that doesn't spend huge amounts of money on seemingly insignificant projects. I'm sure someone there really believes that the new culvert will somehow improve fish survival. For 1.8 million, they could have bought an awful lot of othere property that could protect the productive streams and tributaries. Just keep writing those property tax checks every six months. Hopefully some of the money will be well spent.

-David

I will post and never look back... its not about salmon protection, its about job protection for environmental degree holders and trying to stop or slow down the building of homes. At my college they all talk about how to stop the building of homes and the building of highways. They envision a world were every one lives in a apartment in the city and no one lives in the wilderness, that’s Monroe to you,. The whole movement the pass few years is forwards greater population density in the cities with the hope that it will limit growth out side the cities. One plan that is being tried in the Sacramento area, among others is stopping all building permits out side the city until all usable land is built on in side the city limits. Another plan that has been working well in this area is allowing the lot size to become much smaller per lot in order to build more houses on less land. In my option this is a great sacrifice to quality of life but they( evrio whacks) don’t believe that you need a yard to raise a kid , but most of them do not have kids yet. My point is that by regulating your property with expensive rules that have no usefulness they hope to force you to move into apartments closer to the city by putting the average house out of your reach. The problem with their evil plan is that most of us will drive to the out laying area in order to achieve the quality of life we want. Which is why they spend so much time fighting the building of roads.

17 years ago a road that when past the turn to my folks house was to be widen in order to allow not only better traffic but allow a neighbor to develop his land. He was paying for the road improvements so there would be no cost to the city. A group calling its self the local resident community for slow growth was formed to fight the improvements, which would hinder the development. Well in order to keep this short the local group was not made up of local from that city in fact none of them even lived in the county. They were all activist for the sierra club and elf (the earth first alliance). Once the truth was found out the project went thru and we ended up with a better safer road but it cost the county a lot of money to fight off these a holes.