Grants adding up for Port’s Valley Creek project

PORT WASHINGTON - The City of Port Washington has received a $500,000 grant to design and engineer improvements to the Valley Creek corridor between Veterans Park and Birchwood Hills Nature Preserve.

The grant will supplement a $915,000 grant received from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Foundation and allow the city to complete the engineering plans for the project, Public Works Director Rob Vanden Noven said Tuesday.

“This grant will take up to at least 90% of the engineering cost, but I’m hoping to get it to 100%,” he said.

The grant, which was announced by Gov. Tony Evers and the Department of Administration, is funded as part of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure law.

“This will go a long way to making this project reality,” Vanden Noven said. “All the money (for the project) so far has come from grants.

“These are the type of projects that the federal government wants to promote. They realize the smaller communities can’t do as much without help.”

Vanden Noven credited Melissa Curran, an environmental scientist with Stantec, a sustainable design and engineering company, with writing the grant application.

“She did an extraordinary job,” he said, noting her work helped convince the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program to put the project up for the grant at the federal level.

“It’s very competitive just within the state, let alone nationally,” he said.

Most of the projects that received the grant funding are being done on the nation’s coasts, Vanden Noven said. Only a few are on the Great Lakes.

But, he said, the fact Valley Creek is a tributary to Lake Michigan added to its significance.

The Valley Creek restoration plan will use nature-based solutions to prevent degradation, protect critical infrastructure, reduce flooding risk and restore local habitats.

It’s estimated that construction of the project will cost at least $10 million, Vanden Noven said.

The city will be seeking grants to help pay that amount as well.

“This is the type of project that won’t happen without significant financial assistance,” he said. “Our budget is limited. Grants are critical.”

Without grants, he said, the city would “just be putting Band-Aids on.”

Vanden Noven said he’s confident in the city’s ability to get grants to fund the project, in part because it is considered a “pipeline project.”

That means the granting agencies want to see the work done and will likely support it in the future.

“We have confidence they will be committed to funding this project to completion,” he said. “To use nature-based solutions to prevent further stream degradation is attractive to them, and it promotes coastal resiliency, which is part of the emphasis for this grant process.”

The project “is a project for the long haul,” Vanden Noven said, noting the city has been working on it since 2018.

“I think it’ll be transformative.”