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RFP: Elochoman Headwaters Design Project for Preliminary Design Services

The Cowlitz Indian Tribe (Tribe) secured funding through Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office, (RCO) Salmon Recovery Funding Board (SRFB) to develop preliminary design documents to restore fish passage to 9.5 miles of currently inaccessible habitat and to build channel spanning logjams to arrest channel incision, reconnect floodplains, and provide sediment attenuation on 5.7 miles of the East and West Fork Elochoman, and Otter Creek. This preliminary design project will evaluate and propose treatments to enhance habitats degraded from historic splash damming and extensive tree harvest within the riparian zone. This project will be the first phase of the Tribe's multi-year focus to address limiting factors that continue to impair the recovery of salmon and steelhead populations within the Elochoman River watershed.


The Tribe proposes to assess site conditions, hydrology, and site access, then develop a comprehensive restoration design to restore fish passage, increase floodplain connectivity, and improve habitat complexity to benefit Elochoman River populations of fall chinook, coho, and chum salmon and winter steelhead. The Cowlitz Indian Tribe’s Habitat Restoration Program has established an approach to watershed scale restoration that includes intensive wood placement over extensive project reaches to generate the population level response required to move the dial on salmon recovery. The goal of this intensive and extensive strategy is to r store 30% of key watersheds within the Tribes historic area of interest.


The Tribe will collaborate with the selected design team (consultant) to develop a suite of restoration alternatives and one preliminary design (per RCO Manual 18) to achieve the project goal. The consultant shall provide a detailed approach for each of the following preliminary design objectives in their proposal: 

  1. Restore 9.5 miles of fish passage by backwatering or physically removing a man-made bedrock fish barrier falls on the East Fork Elochoman River.
  2. Develop stable engineered logjams and log complexity structures within the 5.7 miles of project treatment reaches which in clude: 1.7 miles of East Fork, 2.0 miles of West Fork and 2.0 miles of Otter Creek. These log features will increase stream sinuosity, reconnect floodplains, scour pools, attenuate mobile sediment, and provide over-head cover to benefit coho salmon and winter steelhead juveniles.
  3. Coordinate with Tribe and Landowners to develop a riparian thinning plan to treat approximately 30 acres of red alder dominated floodplains and replant the treatment area with conifers species.
  4. Consultant shall provide (or subcontract) baseline green LiDAR flights of the project reaches. Consultant’s green LiDAR will provide a baseline for documenting future changes to the land and submerged surfaces with the proposed treatment reaches. The Tribe anticipates replicating consultant’s initial green LiDAR flights periodically after project construction to inform restoration effectiveness and assess sediment attenuation, side channel creation, and channel/floodplain morphology changes. 
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