Grant adds to county’s $1.4M Clay Bluffs total

Ozaukee County planners are in line for another half million dollars for three local conservation projects.

The  $500,000 grant, which has yet to be awarded to the county, is part of $3 million to be shared among several regional entities, including Ducks Unlimited, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District and Sheboygan County, through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s North American Wetlands Conservation Act grant program, or NAWCA.

The county’s portion of the funding will be used for habitat restoration at:

• $150,000 at Clay Bluffs Cedar Gorge Nature Preserve in the City of Port Washington;

• $150,000 at Milwaukee River Oxbow Nature Preserve in Saukville;

• $200,000 at Sucker Brook in the Town of Belgium.

Each of the three are multimillion-dollar projects that have already received millions of dollars in grants.

For instance, the county partnered with the Ozaukee Washington Land Trust, now known as Restoring Lands, to acquire the 134-acre Clay Bluffs Nature Preserve in fall 2022 for more than $2 million.

Since then, more than $1.4 million, not counting the NAWCA grant, have been obtained by the county for the preserve. Officials hope a portion of the preserve will be open to the public by the end of the year.

The Nature Preserve, located on the Lake Michigan bluffs at the city’s southern border, is of “significant public interest” due to flora and fauna located there and to provide access to the shoreline.

Plans for the Oxbow Nature Preserve include partnering with the Ozaukee County Highway Department to engineer and design a long-term solution to frequent flooding on Highway W in the Village of Saukville by allowing the river to flow under the roadway into a historic oxbow east of the highway.

That will improve “floodplain connectivity for aquatic organism passage into the riparian floodplains, wetlands and historic Milwaukee River oxbow,” county Planning and Parks Director Andrew Struck told the Natural Resources Committee recently.

The oxbow project requires the county to acquire several properties, totaling about 24 acres, near the highway, one of which was donated by the Village of Saukville.

The county plans on creating a 67-acre park on the land that will include a kayak launch and passive recreation uses.

The county was recently invited to apply for a $1.5 million grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation National Coastal Resilience Fund, which requires no matching funds from the county.

If approved, as expected, it would join $2.1 million in state and federal grants already acquired by the county for the project.

Sucker Brook flows south from Sheboygan County through the Town of Belgium and empties into Lake Michigan in the Town of Port Washington.

Improvements planned for the stream aim to make it suitable for spawning fish out of Lake Michigan.

Work includes completing the design and engineering efforts to remeander the stream, which has been straightened by farmers over the decades, connect wetlands and flood plains and restore native vegetation.

The county recently applied for a $5 million grant from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. That would join a $3.2 million NOAA grant awarded in July 2024 to restore fish habitat and a $250,000 grant from the Wisconsin Emergency Management Pre-Disaster Flood Resilience Implementation program to reduce flooding.

A one-to-two nonfederal match for the entire $3 million is “encouraged,” Struck said, with funds already spent eligible to be counted against the match requirement.

That means the county already has almost $1.49 million in multiple state and local nonprofit contributions that can be counted against the match.

NAWCA has distributed more than $2 billion in grants since 1991 and leveraged almost $5.6 billion in other contributions to help restore 32 million acres of wetlands in North America, according to the program.