Cleaning up Bear Creek on Home Services

Dec

Cleaning up Bear Creek

Craig Harper would like to see a Bear Creek thatâ€™s clean enough so kids could wade in it. Cindy Deacon Williams wants a Bear Creek with more trees on its bank to cool water for fish.

Oregonâ€™s Department of Environmental Quality is developing targets for bacteria and water temperature in the creek. With targets issued in six to nine months, creek “users” will have to show how theyâ€™ll meet the goals.

Although new restrictions may help Harper and Williams come closer to their wishes, the requirements will likely have a high cost, especially for Ashlandâ€™s wastewater treatment plant, which will have to somehow chill the temperature of its summer effluent.

“Weâ€™ve got this beautiful stream running through our community, and you are not supposed to touch it due to all this pollution,” said Harper, Bear Creek Watershed Council coordinator with the Rogue Valley Council of Governments. “If there were better controls on bacteria sources, then people could use and appreciate the streams more.”

Bear Creek at Kirtland road showed the most improvement in water quality, according to a state index that ranked changes from 1992 to 2001 for 151 monitoring sites. But the site still falls into the “very poor” category.

The new rules will take their place alongside a jumble of collaborative community efforts, current regulations, monitoring programs and creekside enhancements, all aimed to understand or increase creek health.

Current DEQ rules regulate ammonia, phosphorus and biochemical oxygen demand in Bear Creek. The rules are required by national clean water legislation enforced by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

A different set of rules governs waste from agricultural users. A 1996 Oregon Senate Bill separated out standards on animal waste management to prevent bacteria in the stream.

“One of the huge problems is horse owners storing waste in a flood plain where its likely to enter the waters,” said Tim Stevenson of the Oregon Department of Agriculture. Some enforcement actions have been brought against property owners adjacent to the creek, said Stevenson.

Communities along Bear Creek submitted applications for storm water discharge permits to DEQ in March to comply with more new EPA requirements. Draft storm drain management plans were included and must be finalized by March. The requirements donâ€™t include target figures for pollution and temperature. But they do require actions, including public education, to clean up runoff that gets into the creek from storm drain systems.

On Thursday, Southern Oregon Universityâ€™s Les AuCoin Institue took a first step toward a watershed approach to improve the creek. Representatives of the Bear Creek Watershed Council, Headwaters, Friends of the Green Springs, Rogue Basin Coordinating Council, Real Corps, Bear Creek Watershed Education Project, and Water for Irrigation, Streams and Economy gathered for a first meeting.

“Weâ€™re trying to take a real broad look. I think a lot of people who work in various parts of the watershed realize thereâ€™s a lot of value in taking a watershed perspective,” said Jack Williams, a fellow at the institute and former Siskiyou and Rogue National Forest supervisor.

About 1,000 young trees and shrubs were planted at the J. Herbert Stone nursery on Jackson Creek, a Bear Creek tributary, last fall in a pioneer program to provide shade for the stream andreduce non-native blackberries that invade stream banks in Southern Oregon. An Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board grant funds the project.

“Bear Creek has the same sort of problem,” said Max Bennett, who heads the project through the Oregon State University Extension Service. “As trees die, there arenâ€™t a lot of places for trees to replace them because nothing can come up over the blackberries.”

Up to 7,500 trees will be planted along Bear Creek next year. Rogue Valley Council of Governments has received $91,000 from federal and foundation sources that will allow planting 7.5 miles of the creek with conifers, broadleaf species and willows. Tentative sites include areas in Talent and Medford and the burned areas at the Jackson County fairgrounds and between Medford and Central Point.

Ashland Public Works Director Paula Brown hopes that planting trees will be trade-off for for the relatively warm effluent the treatment plant discharges into the creek. In the summer the effluent is about 68 degrees. Bear Creekâ€™s summertime target temperature at its mouth is 64 degrees.

Brown says up to 80 percent of Bear Creekâ€™s summer flow comes from the treatment plant. The water is extremely clean as the result of a $33.6 million upgrade. Putting in chilling mechanisms would be costly and environmentally harmful, says Brown.

An alternative to chilling now in preliminary discussion stages, might send the treated water to Talent Irrigation District. But when the City Council opted for the upgrade in 2000 over another system, they were adamant to keep water in the creek for fish.