The County installed a bottomless culvert in our road this summer. The big concrete rectangle that is designed to help fish pass. They did some other work to restore the little seasonal creek that runs through the culvert. It blocked traffic for 2 weeks and the whole project was about 6 weeks long. I checked with King County and the total cost was about 1.8 million to do this. The seasonal creek dries up in May and starts up again in the fall. If you walk about 100 yards below the culvert the blackberries, brush etc are so thick no fish bigger than a minnow could get through even if that. There really is not a creek here the water stays on the surface and jsut kind of flatens out and works through a couple of hundred yards of brush. It then flows about a mile to the Snoqualmie river. They are many more obsatacles like this. There is a 90+ year old man who grew up here and said that he had never seen a fish of any type in this little 2' wide creek and he played it it as a kid. Upstream from this new culvert the drop is such that no fish could get up it either.

I had to go through a 1 year enviornemental review to buy my place near this creek 12 years ago. The previous owner that sold to me had to pay $150K in studies to mitigate wetlands etc. for people to build on the 4 ,10 acre lots he was selling. Mine has a similar seasonal creek through one corner. No fish in it after extensive review. It seemed to me at the time the county and state people involved were young and idealistic they had little working knowledge of what the systems fish potential past or present is or was. It seemed like they had an agenda to preserve as much as they could . I am all for that for the most part. My concern is that it seems to me they spent close to $2 million to to protect what? The bio filtration of run off etc was just fine in this spot. If fish ever spwned here none of the locals seem to know about it. I would think $2 million could have done much more else where. It was more than $2 million by the way because I saw 3 similar projects along the Snoqualmie this summer.

Any one know if this is unique to King County or are other areas this crazy with our tax dollars.

I get to go in later this year for a hearing on my property taxes it should be interesting.