Oregon Public Broadcasting

Environmental advocates have complained for years that Oregon has thousands of miles of degraded streams, and that current efforts to improve the streams are moving too slowly.

Some argue that it's not a funding problem, or a scientific dilemma – but red tape that's at fault.

Rob Manning reports on a new approach developed in Portland intended to put projects in the water a lot more quickly.

This tributary to the Nehalem River is pretty shallow on this autumn afternoon. The landowner here, Peter Hayes, says the stream, and the bridge we're standing on looked a whole lot different two years ago, when the same floods that covered the town of Vernonia crashed through this canyon.

Peter Hayes: "There was a major high-water event. The water was six inches up onto the beams of this bridge."

Hayes waded through the water two years ago with two stream restoration experts – including one who'd placed logs in the water years before, to help migrating salmon. They were scratching their heads about how to restore the stream all over again.

Peter Hayes: "We left that conversation saying ‘we're going to make this happen, but where's the money going to come from, how are we going to make this work?'."

As a forester who sells sustainable lumber, Hayes is more than willing to "make it work," as he puts it. But even a committed landowner can get fed up with the time and effort it takes to get a project going.

Joe Whitworth with the Portland non-profit, Freshwater Trust, has seen that, again and again.

Joe Whitworth: "We were working with a landowner on the south coast who wanted to fix a mile of stream. This represented about 60 hours of actual ‘dirt work.' And it took us more than three and a half years in funding and permitting cycles to get the chance to do that one week of work."

Whitworth says the tedious process means streams aren't being improved. 

Joe Whitworth: "In Oregon of its 115,000 stream miles, roughly 30,000 fail to support aquatic life fully. And another 40,000 are on the bubble." 

Whitworth says at the current pace, it would take more than 70 years to restore all the streams that need it. Much of that work needs to take place on private land – where private landowners can easily run out of patience.

But Whitworth believes he can speed things up. He doesn't have a scientific breakthrough, or a new funding stream. He has a software program, called "StreamBank," geared to cut through government red tape. 

Joe Whitworth: ""Because this is a highly repetitive process, it lends itself well to creating a software platform that essentially embeds all of the agency criteria, under the Clean Water Act, under the Endangered Species Act, under the design criteria for putting wood in stream, essentially all of that can be embedded into the algorithms in a way that we can streamline without cutting corners."

Basically, a landowner, or a restoration expert logs in and fills out the on-line forms.

Joe Whitworth: "We start at the project site – you type in the location.…"

As an applicant clicks through the system, the program assembles the legal and design criteria that the project has to follow. It can put together a potential budget for the project, and even line up funding sources.

StreamBank has been tested on $1.5 million worth of restoration work – including a $26,000 project in Peter Hayes' forest.

Maggie Peyton with the Upper Nehalem Watershed Council remembers she was slogging through another project the old-fashioned way, as she was using the  StreamBank tool to help Peter Hayes' project.

Maggie Peyton: "We did the project in two months from the time we were engaged by Freshwater Trust to the time we paid the contractors. The other project that I worked on – that project took four years to develop and implement, and another year to completely clear the books."

A number of environmentalists, and agency officials weren't immediately sold on Stream Bank when they first heard of it.

Travis Williams with Willamette Riverkeeper says he was initially concerned that system could fast-track potentially harmful projects. But he's been reassured since.

Travis Williams: "We're not talking about a construction project. We're talking about restoring habitat, so the degree to which we can increase the pace of that restoration, I think StreamBank can serve a useful purpose."

Government agencies are also getting on board. Oregon's Departments of State Lands and Environmental Quality have both worked with Freshwater Trust to help automate permitting of StreamBank projects. The State Lands department backed a new law this year to push that fast-tracking even further.

Peter Hayes, who saw StreamBank in its infancy, as a member of the Board of Forestry, says he's surprised that the government has embraced the change.

Peter Hayes: "How flexible would agencies be – state and federal? And I tend to be an optimistic guy, but as I looked at that plan, I said ‘there's a gamble here – will people rise to the occasion?' I was blown away."

Now, restoration advocates hope that the fast pace can catch on. Federal agencies are still learning about the program, but say that that cutting red tape – where possible – is a goal of the Obama Administration.