SEQUIM — Sequim city officials and those interested in salmon habitat found a way to help young fish after a long talk this week.
Sequim will contribute $25,000 in cash plus $25,000 in in-kind services toward replacement of an undersized culvert at the Pitship Pocket Estuary, a key passage for salmon from Sequim Bay.
The council voted 6-1 Monday night to make that contribution toward the estuary project led by the North Olympic Salmon Coalition with support from the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe.
Council member Erik Erichsen cast the dissenting vote.
It wasn’t easy arriving at this point.
In recent weeks, the city of Sequim received a reminder from the North Olympic Salmon Coalition that it had agreed to invest $50,000 worth of engineering services toward improvement of the Pitship estuary just south of John Wayne Marina.
The coalition won a $380,250 grant in December to replace the inadequate culvert there, thus providing a better inlet for young salmon into the estuary.
The Pitship Pocket Estuary is on property owned by the John Wayne family, which plans to build a 375-unit resort community on the land adjacent to the marina.
That grant, awarded by the state Salmon Recovery Funding Board, was based in part on Sequim’s $50,000 contribution, promised last September by former Public Works Director James Bay.
But by this summer, Bay had retired and Sequim had begun to feel pinched financially.
A potentially painful 2009 budget season looms and sales-tax revenues are dipping in the slumped economy — but the salmon coalition needed the city’s contribution before starting the Pitship work.
The old culvert under West Sequim Bay Road is too small and too high to let juvenile Jimmycomelately chum salmon into the estuary, said Michael Blanton, the state Fish and Wildlife Department’s North Olympic Peninsula watershed steward.
And “the fish need [the estuary] now,” Blanton told the council.
