Land Trust starts new project on Kandoll Farm

The Columbia Land Trust will start work this month to re-align drainage of its Kandoll Farm property on Kandoll Road near Rosburg.

The project is designed to improve habitat for juvenile salmonids, but a major benefit will be to reduce erosion of land on Seal River Slough.

As part of another habitat enhancement project several years ago, engineers from Ducks Unlimited helped the land trust replace tidegates on a channel leading into the slough with two large culverts. That resulted in increased flow in Seal Slough which is now eroding dikes along private property.

Poul Toftemark, one of the owners of property along the slough, said Monday that several 10-feet-wide chunks of earth have sluffed into the slough during the past year.

Ian Sinks, land trust project manager, said the work would require closure of Kandoll Road July 15-September 30; he said he would bring details to the board of commissioners' meeting next Tuesday for formal action on the closure.

Commissioner Blair Brady commented that there is farmland on Kandoll Road that could be affected by the closure; Sinks said the closure would take effect beyond the access to the farm land.

The work will be Phase II of a project to realign Kandoll Farm drainage and create new wetland fish habitat.

The land trust will breach an old dike protecting one edge of the property from the Grays River. They'll dig a network of channels in the former farm land that will carry drainage into the Grays, not Seal Slough.

The land trust intends to close the existing culverts leading to Seal Slough, but, Sinks said, they learned that the state Department of Natural Resources claims ownership of the tidelands in the culverts and would require an easement to modify them.

So, he said, engineers designed a structure that will divert much of the drainage into the new channels. The wooden structure will resemble a beaver dam and be filled with woody material. On each side, dirt excavated to create new channels will be mounded into a berm to keep water from flowing into the culverts.

At some point, Sinks said, they'll apply for a DNR permit to complete the culvert work, but by avoiding the process now, they'll be able to get the work done this summer.

Sinks said the land trust will also want to close Mill Road to all but local traffic this month to complete the chip seal paving of the dike they constructed last year.