Sunday afternoon I had the opportunity to take a tour through parts of Fife's Wapato Creek with Fife Mayor Barry Johnson, who has been a strong voice for conservation on the Wapato system. We were fortunate to have very nice, even sunny weather during our afternoon tour.
While Wapato Creek has been hammered by development, I'm impressed with the opportunities for restoration that are still available. The City of Fife has done a good job in recent years of looking for restoration opportunities and beginning to set aside properties for future work. I'm hopeful that we can partner with the city to develop some of these sites for restoration.
We will be partnering with the city this fall on a one-day planting project along the creek. We'll have more details on that later in the summer. I expect that effort will be the beginning of a larger project. Conservation is like a tree, if you plant the seed, it will attempt to grow. This first planting project is the seed!
I also learned about a cool park the city recently built, called Wedge Park. It's right alongside Valley Avenue at 28th St. E. and abuts the Wapato. (I'm thinking this might be a future project site). Barry advocated the inclusion of pervious paver blocks at the parking lot to serve as a model for Low Impact Development. This is similar to what the Friends and the City of Federal Way did at the West Hylebos Wetlands parking lot (though we used pervious pavement, rather than the paver blocks). It's refreshing to hear public officials like Barry who are getting out in front of the stormwater issue and advocating for leading edge techniques like this.
Thanks for the tour, Barry!