It wasn’t a big surprise to the Sheepscot River Watershed Council’s (SRWC) coordinator that federal stimulus grant money didn’t flow into the organization’s coffers.
Charlie Baeder said the council applied to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for $4 million of economic recovery funds. The bid was part of a state Dept. of Marine Resources application and would have been used for construction and engineering costs to improve fish passage and habitat.
The SRWC’s mission is to support and facilitate primarily fisheries restoration efforts in the 58-mile-long watershed
Instead, awards were made to a dam removal project on the Penobscot River and a culvert project on dirt roads on Washington County rivers. “They’ve been in the pipeline longer than ours,” Baeder said.
“We picked 20 culverts in the [Sheepscot] watershed to fix,” he said, a number selected from 65 “perched” culverts identified during a barrier survey conducted last summer. Such culverts are out of water and migratory fish can’t get past them at least part of the year, Baeder explained.
While such barriers were found from Boothbay in the south to Montville in the north, most included in the application occur in the lower part of the watershed. They were chosen because it’s important to “fix these first to get the fish upstream,” Baeder said. “Two or three are in Whitefield, one in Edgecomb, one in Alna on Ben Brook, a couple in Palermo,” he noted, and all are on tributaries feeding into the river’s main stem or the West Branch.
NOAA had $170 million to spend, “and they got requests for $2 billion. It was oversubscribed,” Baeder said. “There wasn’t enough money to go around.”
The Sheepscot project would have provided about 40 jobs in the course of a year. “It would have been money well spent,” he added, and would have been spread around Lincoln, Waldo and Kennebec counties.
While the council doesn’t know how its proposal was scored, Baeder feels sure one factor hampering approval was “we only had a month to put it together and all the engineering hadn’t been completed. They were looking for shovel-ready projects.” Also, the council may have been seeking too much money. “With more time we might have prioritized the culverts better,” the coordinator said.
Baeder is hoping for a second or expanded round of NOAA funding. “We’re gearing up for that,” he said.