The Lynnwood Times is naming Snohomish County Public Works’ Little Bear Creek project as the 2025 Environmental Stewardship of the Year for changing the way the County handles wetland mitigation while saving millions of dollars in future taxpayer funds.
The 17-acre project is now a protected wetland mitigation site that allows the County to be proactive in addressing mitigation requirements by generating wetland credits for future project impacts. Consolidating wetland restoration and enhancement efforts in advance is expected to save the County more than $30 million on 11 county road projects, when compared to building concurrent wetland mitigation projects or purchasing wetland credits from a mitigation bank.
Developing LBCAMS started in 2017 when the County purchased a derelict property built on wetland fill in the densely populated southern part of the county. Returning the site to a high-functioning forested wetland involved removing 17 structures, 4.25 acres of wetland fill, 1,200 feet of drainpipe and electrical conduit, and more than 37,000 square feet of impervious surface, and adding 6,300 cubic yards of compost and wood chip mulch and more than 21,000 native plants. The total project cost was $4.2 million.
What was unique about the project, according to Oscar Fuentes, Project Manager, is that there were a lot of upfront costs, where most county projects’ costs come towards the end of completion. For Little Bear Creek upfront costs accounted for more than 50% of the total project cost.
An additional benefit to this is Fuentes was able to work with the rest of the team to come up with four different avenues to weigh costs for the upcoming 11 different projects the mitigation site will be used for, compared the costs, and was able to show management that there would be a significant return investment.
By using all local funds, one of the tools utilized was what is termed, “forced account,” which allowed the contractor to be compensated for their efforts during the “field fitting” process. Field fitting, essentially, is the on-the-ground engineering, separate to the preliminary “in-office” engineering behind the scenes which may not be able to account for certain forces of nature.
The project was also unique in that most county projects, for example capital projects, of which most of Fuentes’ career has been spent working on, involve building infrastructure where Little Bear Creek involved removing infrastructure to restore the area back to a protected wetland.
It was extremely important to keep visionary and optimistic, Fuentes shared, in order to remain on schedule, and within budget and scope because there were various stakeholders involved.
Fuentes said out of every project he has worked on the Little Bear Creek mitigation site stands out because all the pieces just came together. That’s not to say it didn’t experience its challenges, the global pandemic for example impacted its progression as it did most things, but the team never gave up and kept at it.
This was Fuentes’ first ever project as Project Manager and he shared that the knowledge and skills learned will be invaluable for the remainder of his career.
Darla Boyer, Environmental Lead for the project, described the project as an “interconnecting, recirculating web of knowledge and people,” adding that many different aspects came together, from permits to breaching new trails in advanced mitigation—something the state of Washington has yet to fully dive deep into before now.
The process required outreach and discussions with people Public Works may have not normally come in communications with, but these different agencies banded together to move it across the finish line.
Back in May the Little Bear Creek Advance Mitigation Site (LBCAMS) project was named a national 2024 Public Works Project of the Year from the American Public Works Association in the Environmental under $5 million category.
Author: Kienan Briscoe
