From forests to flagellates: The Water and Land Resources Division is a resilient watershed utility

On any given day, the people in the Water and Land Resources Division are working on everything from the broadest of environmental issues of our landscape, to the microscopic work that takes place in our lab to provide one of the most crucial assets in our field – data. From stewarding the region’s expansive forests, to measuring organisms that are invisible to the naked eye in our waterbodies, there is no job too big or too small for us to take on to help ensure clean water and healthy habitat in King County. 

From flagellates under a microscope to hundred-acre forests, WLRD supports the entire watershed.

“The Water and Land Resources Division carries out a very diverse mission. Using nearly a dozen different funding sources, we provide the science and the technical expertise to support residents and decision makers in their stewardship of our natural resources. Like our sister divisions that serve as wastewater and solid waste utilities, we are, in essence, a watershed utility.”

Josh Baldi, WLRD director

A significant proportion of our workforce spend their days in the field monitoring the effectiveness of our projects and programs; preventing or eradicating threats to our environment; building or repairing critical infrastructure that is unseen by the casual observer; meeting with residents to provide technical assistance for their land or business; and protecting or restoring the habitat that the region’s native species rely on.

The Noxious Weed Control Program crews created safety guidelines to work together in the field.

When the COVID-19 emergency hit, WLRD staff quickly adopted new safety practices for field and lab work and deployed new online tools for public engagement and partner meetings to continue delivering essential services to our customers safely and without interruption.   

Under the microscope, behind the data 

The King County Environmental Laboratory was already well into a major construction project to replace critical infrastructure – fume hoods and heating systems – when the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic fully hit. Employees at the lab acted quickly to continue essential sample analysis required for public health, water quality permit compliance, public swimming beach monitoring, and support for the Solid Waste and Wastewater Treatment divisions.

A construction project to replace a major portion of the lab’s environment was in progress during the pandemic.

Workflows drastically changed to maximize teleworking; moving from paperwork to digital platforms and ensuring safe distancing for in-person work at the laboratory. Communication with our customers and the public never slowed, and County programs continued providing essential services. (Check out, The King County Environmental Lab: Resilience and Adaptation Under Pressure.)

Teams of WLRD scientists adapted monitoring practices to ensure the safety of field staff by adjusting for social distancing, wearing masks, and conducting training and planning sessions outdoors or by teleconference. 

Field teams continued to do monitoring using masks and social distancing practices. Some employees’ environments made it easier to social distance.

WLRD’s scientists continued their collaborative work with Public Health – Seattle & King County to monitor the health and public safety of swimming beaches; generated new research about threatened juvenile Chinook salmon in the Snoqualmie River; continued their groundbreaking work to preserve imperiled Lake Sammamish kokanee salmon by partnering with a private hatchery on Orcas Island; and promoted and coordinated best practices for managing beavers.

Providing water quality sampling and analysis to beach managers allows them to protect people and pets from getting sick.

Responding to multiple disasters 

In early 2020, before COVID was a household word, King County responded to the most severe flooding in decades which led to a Presidential Major Disaster Declaration, the 13th declaration of this kind since 1990.

During flooding on the Cedar River in February, the Riverbend Lower Levee was washed away, which achieved a major aspect of the planned project to widen the floodplain.

Due to the severity of the flooding countywide in January and February, damage inspection of all 511 levees and revetments – normally done biannually – was accelerated and completed by October to quickly schedule any needed repairs. Levees and revetments are essential facilities that help to reduce flood and erosion risks to life and safety, homes, roads and farms and other businesses.

In 2020, six repair projects and seven flood-risk reduction projects were completed across six river basins. The Flood Warning Center, now in its 60^th year, restructured operations to ensure continuity in delivering critical flood information to agencies and residents while adhering to social distancing guidelines brought about by COVID-19. A new Countywide Capital Team was created to expand capacity for responding to urgent river facility repairs. WLRD is the primary contracted service provider to the King County Flood Control District for flood warning, facility inspection and repair, and flood hazard management capital projects. 

New programs and pandemic support 

King County launched the nation’s first County-led Forest Carbon Program, to sell carbon sequestration credits. The revenue supports the King County Land Conservation Initiative and provides incentives for preserving and enhancing privately owned and managed forests. The program received an award from the National Association of Counties for innovation in sustainability.

The Forest Carbon Program offers local companies the option to offset their carbon emissions which helps to protect the forests in our community.

Forest restoration projects that improve forest health and enhance opportunities to sequester carbon have increased and directly contributed to the success of planting 1 Million Trees with partners across King County.  

WLRD’s leadership through the King County Farmland Preservation Program over the past 40 years has kept nearly 16,000 acres of the best farmland available for production. Focused on equitable outcomes, the program also ensures land access is available to underserved communities and new farmers. 

King County’s farming industry was hit hard by COVID-19. Our agriculture team responded by helping launch the Local Food Finder map, connecting consumers directly with farmers when farmers markets and restaurants closed or reduced service early in the pandemic. The ag team also supported the distribution of $1.4 million in federal CARES Act funding to support farmers, farmers markets, food banks and senior centers.

Clean water, healthy habitat 

Water and Land staff are part of the regional Hazardous Waste Management Program to reduce exposure to hazardous materials and prevent toxic compounds from entering the environment. All prevention services were shifted to online and phone-only services. Vouchers were offered for hazardous materials management and personal protective equipment was distributed. A new website increased access to information about natural yard care, safe disposal of hazardous materials, and water quality protection by offering this information in 13 languages. The “Guilt Free KC” and “Ojo con el Cloro” (“Careful with Bleach”) campaigns promoted safe hazardous waste disposal and safer cleaning practices to protect human health and the environment – especially relevant as people turned to harsh chemicals like bleach to rid their homes of germs during the pandemic.

Examples of multilingual outreach materials available being used by the Hazardous Waste Management Program to increase access and education and reduce toxic substances from entering the environment.

Landward, the Noxious Weed Control Program developed new field safety protocols to keep employees safe as they continued to control noxious weeds to protect people and the environment. Priority was given to high-risk infestation control that put people and critical resources in danger, and to property owners highly impacted by noxious weeds. Despite challenges, knotweed control was maintained on the Cedar, upper Snoqualmie, Skykomish, middle and lower Green rivers, and Soos Creek. In all, specialists surveyed more than 8,000 infestations of regulated noxious weeds, 86 percent of which were controlled.

The Noxious Weed Program’s Healthy Lands Project (HeLP) carried out weed control on more than 20 new public and private open space parcels, improving public benefits and supporting green jobs on nearly 70 acres. HeLP supported the new North Highline open space property purchased by King County Parks through a new match-waiver program that increases open space for underserved communities.

By providing noxious weed control on land acquired by King County for open space ensures the land is healthy and available for everyone.

Adjusting to the world of on-line presentations, staff competed for state-managed grants for Floodplains by Design and Puget Sound Acquisition and Restoration dollars and received number-one rankings in both highly competitive programs for construction of the Fall City Floodplain Restoration Project to restore 145 acres of floodplain process and reduce 100-year flood elevations on over 300 acres of Snoqualmie River habitat. The grants would put the division in position to construct the roughly $15 million project in 2022.

Managing stormwater is another key component to protecting water quality. In 2020, significant steps were taken toward developing a Green Stormwater Infrastructure incentive program within unincorporated King County. Additionally, the Our Green Duwamish coalition used innovative tools to engage partners watershed planning efforts for increased clean water.

Stormwater management includes moving runoff through a system of pipes and culverts, many of which are known barriers to fish passage that hamper efforts to restore weak fish populations. Removing these barriers is one of the most effective ways to quickly restore salmon habitat access. King County Fish Passage Restoration Program employees spent 2020 in the field creating an inventory of these barriers around the county.

As of November, the field crew had completed 1,438 site visits in 2020, reaching a total of 2,851 site visits since spring 2019,and identifying almost 800 fish passage barriers at County assets. The next step is to determine how removing these barriers will be prioritized to help the most fish get to the best habitat as soon as possible.

The above video shows chum spawning inside the new Green River Road box culvert into Mary Olson Creek near Auburn. The use of the culvert by fish so soon after construction was completed, shows the success of the design and construction of the project by the King County Roads Division.

Supporting and protecting King County’s watersheds ranges from creating expansive, multi-generation visions for our work, to monitoring the smallest organisms and connecting their health to ours. It is work done in the field, in the lab, and now via online video calls. All of it is done with respect to the safety of our employees and the commitment to our work.

Land Conservation Initiative: Preserving and protecting farmland and urban green space

Posted on January 16, 2019 by Local Food Initiative

What is the Land Conservation Initiative?

The Land Conservation Initiative is the way we can protect the livability, health, and ecological integrity of our region for everyone. Access to nature and open space is the foundation to our collective quality of life. However, development threatens working lands that produce food, jobs, and a rural way of life. The Initiative sets forth the goal of conserving and preserving 65,000 acres of remaining high conservation value lands throughout King County within the next 30 years.

This Initiative is a regional collaboration between King County, cities, business people, farmers, environmental partners, and others that began by creating a strategy to preserve our last, most important natural lands, resource lands and green spaces.

“The main goals of the Initiative are to accelerate investments in land conservation to save money, to ensure critical natural areas and resource lands can be preserved before they are lost to other uses, and to ensure green space for all residents,” said Bob Burns, Deputy Director of King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks. “Prior to the Initiative we estimated it would take 60 to 70 years to protect those 65,000 acres. The goal of the Initiative is to cut that in half.  Because land values rise faster than the growth of our revenue streams, accelerating the pace to within 30 years will save an estimated $15 billion.”

The 65,000 acres of land fall within six categories: urban green space, trails, natural lands, river corridors, farmlands, and forests.

How is this initiative funded?

The primary funding source is the Conservation Futures Tax (CFT) fund, which is a property tax that exists on all parcels in the county.  The CFT requires a 50 percent match in most cases.

“We work to find match dollars, from other local, state or federal sources, to pair up with the CFT fund,” Bob said. “One way we invest our land conservation dollars is to buy farmland easements on our most valuable agricultural lands. Easements to remove development rights from private lands will preserve farmland and help keep farmland affordable and active, supporting local food production.”

How will it help protect agricultural land and green space in King County?

“Approximately 15,000 acres of the 65,000 acres goal is agricultural land,” Bob said. The Farmland Preservation Program (FPP) is an important component of this Initiative by preserving rapidly diminishing farmland through development rights purchases.

In addition to the 15,000 acres of agricultural land identified in rural areas, the Initiative also plans to protect 2,500 to 3,000 acres of urban green spaces, some of which could be used for community gardens.

Community gardens and open spaces make us healthier and our neighborhoods more livable

“An exciting component of this Initiative is urban green space preservation,” Bob said. “A key goal of the LCI is to ensure there is green space for every resident in King County. We want to make sure every neighborhood has green space. These green spaces will be preserved in ways that focus on resident interests and needs. The communities will drive how these green spaces will be used, whether that is through a community garden, open space, or other passive use.

“Green spaces provide a multitude of benefits for residents, and not all of our communities currently experience these benefits,” he said. “Every resident should have the opportunity to live their best lives, and providing access to open spaces for every neighborhood will help eliminate disparities in the quality of life for residents.”

In addition to addressing open space inequities, preserving farmland and green spaces will support locally grown food, which helps strengthen the local food economy and increase community resilience in the face of climate change.

“Investing in the preservation of farmland and green spaces will strengthen our local economy and promote a more robust local food system, which will benefit us all,” Bob said.

Learn more about the Land Conservation Initiative here.

New Fish Resource Monitoring Program

By Jim Bower

King County is ground zero for managing both rapid urbanization and highly valued fish resources. The County and numerous other partners have spent millions of dollars on fish conservation and fish habitat projects, as well as floodplain restoration, land protection, stormwater controls, land use regulations, and other salmon recovery efforts. Do you ever wonder if all the steps we take to conserve the County’s environment and fish resources are making a difference? Are we on the right track?

King County’s Science and Technical Support Section has initiated a Fish Resources Monitoring Program to track and more importantly, drive improvement of the overall effectiveness of ongoing strategies to conserve our fish resources. The program will implement a suite of methodologies to determine if our strategies are producing an overall positive, cumulative effect on fish populations and fish habitat. Furthermore, the program will evaluate the return on County (and other partner) investments in fish resources; where and how the County can maximize the effectiveness of future investments in fish resources; and whether or not changes should be made to protection, mitigation and restoration efforts.

A technical team from across King County’s Water and Land Resources Division (WLRD) began work in early 2017 to develop an initial, multi-prong approach to address the program goals and questions. The team started by considering fundamental analysis options, such as project-level, status and trend, and intensively monitored watershed assessments. Over time, the program may tackle these challenging goals and questions from different scales and scopes, along with changing priorities. The acquisition of additional status and trends data across major watersheds in King County will also be explored. However, in the near term, the initial approach by the team is likely to involve two separate methods:

A meta-analysis of approximately 18 project-level monitoring efforts overseen by the River and Floodplain Management Section and Ecological Restoration and Engineering Services Unit within WLRD. This analysis is expected to utilize “log response ratios,” which measure the proportional changes of important ecological variables caused by a range of treatments (Hedges et al 1999). The results of individual monitoring efforts within the meta-analysis will be weighted based on the type of experimental control.

A variation of intensively monitored watersheds by replicating the 2014 study Assessing Land Use Effects and Regulatory Effectiveness on Streams in Rural Watersheds of King County, Washington (Lucchetti et al 2014). This approach will evaluate changes to important fish habitat variables after 10 plus years of implementation of “critical area” regulatory protections. This analysis will also initiate the assessment of fish population biomass, richness, and diversity among the study watersheds.

Both analyses are expected to help describe the performance of current resource management strategies and inform future adaptive management.

A concurrent program task is developing a spatially related fish population and habitat database. Over time, the database will incorporate historic and current fish resource information, including survey data, related reports, and supplemental narratives.  This will require coordination with other local and regional data collection efforts, such as those by Tribes, WRIAs, Puget Sound Partnership, and state and federal agencies. The data is anticipated to be associated with high-resolution hydrography and delivered to any desktop or online ArcGIS end-user in their own, customizable GIS environment.

A “Year 1” program status report will be completed in February 2018. Future bi-annual status reports will review ongoing data collection and assessments, describe data gaps, promote new opportunities for adaptive management, and ensure current and relevant resource management questions are still being asked. The periodic status report will also be the primary opportunity to propose future program monitoring and assessment methodologies based on current findings.

Read more about the King County SciFYI newsletter.

Jim Bower is an Environmental Scientist III/Fish Ecologist in the King County Science and Technical Support Section. He is King County’s technical representative for the Lake Sammamish kokanee and WRIA 8 Chinook restoration planning areas. His work with native kokanee involves collaboration with numerous public agencies, private landowners, and conservation organizations; his work includes various long-term monitoring and coordination of annual kokanee recovery actions. Jim also provides technical support to WRIA 8 project planning, study design, monitoring implementation, and grant review.

After 25 years of work, a geomorphologist has a deep understanding of how rivers change

For a quarter of a century, Terry Butler has been observing the way rivers course through King County.

He has seen some, like the Tolt, transform overnight, when an avulsion – the rapid abandonment of a river channel to create a new one – has occurred. He has seen others migrate gradually, moving laterally across a basin over the course of years. He has watched side channels become main channels, witnessed erosion and sedimentation and has seen the dramatic changes a landslide can trigger.

Terry Butler, a fluvial geomorphologist with King County’s Water and Land Resources Division, tracks ever-changing river conditions.

“That’s why my work has been endlessly fascinating,” he said. “Rivers are dynamic. They’re prone to change. And yet people generally live near rivers and construct things near rivers. We’re drawn to rivers. And that can create problems.”

Though his position has changed over the years, Terry is now considered a fluvial geomorphologist – a person who studies the physical processes that shape rivers and streams. And as he retires after 25 years from what is now called the River and Floodplain Management Section in the Water and Land Resources Division, he carries with him a vast knowledge of river processes, public policy and channel migration – a trove of information born of years of research and in-the-field observations.

“The body of work Terry has accomplished is significant,” Jeanne Stypula, supervising engineer in the Rivers Section and Terry’s boss, said. “He has a unique blend of skills. He understands policy, code, technical issues and of course science. He’s done a lot of heavy-lifting over the years.”

Terry is a lanky man with a gentle manner. He’s patient with non-technical people in the section, suggesting books they might read to deepen their understanding of riverine processes. He’s funny, warm and easy-going. He’s also deeply admired in the Rivers Section. At a recognition for him at a recent staff meeting, many people wiped away tears as Jeanne read a poem she had written about him.

Terry was hired as an engineer in 1992 and began working in the Green River Basin. The staff in the section numbered about a dozen, and the section was within what was then called the Department of Public Works. Since then, the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks was created – where the Rivers Section now lives – followed by the King County Flood Control District in 2008. Section staff today number around 50.

Over the course of his years, Terry has helped to shape a new and progressive approach to riverine public policy. He was part of the team that moved the county away from flood control and towards floodplain management – “a paradigm shift,” according to Steve Bleifuhs, the section manager, that recognizes flood-risk reduction doesn’t always translate into controlling a river.

“Terry’s role was to provide the scientific foundation for how channels migrate and how rivers work, which in turn influenced hazard mapping and public policy. It was his work on channel migration zones that influences so much of what we do today,” Steve said.

Much else has changed over the course of Terry’s 25 years, including a technological revolution that has altered the way he and other river scientists work. When Terry started, LiDAR – aerial imagery that uses laser to map river-basin topography – didn’t exist. Nor were GIS – Geographic Information Systems – or, for that matter, high-tech sonar-based river surveys in widespread use. Terry recalls doing river surveys by standing in the middle of a channel with a survey rod while Jeanne stood on the bank taking measurements.

A commitment to science, however, has been a constant. Throughout his 25 years, Terry said, “I’ve tried to bring scientifically based information to people, from decision-makers to property owners. I’ve also stressed the importance of understanding hazard vs. risk. Hazard in and of itself is not the issue. It’s the risk. Sometimes flood risk reduction can meaning getting people out of the way of the hazard, not controlling the hazard.”

What he will miss most about his job, he added, are those interactions when people concerned about a river’s channel migration or some other risk suddenly understood what the science was showing about the situation – those “aha moments” when someone began to see the larger picture.

“It’s deeply satisfying when people get it. For a scientist who works in the public realm, that’s what matters most,” he said.

Learn more about King County river channel migration hazards.