‘Extremely beneficial’: Ilwaco finalizes groundbreaking watershed acquisition

ILWACO — Several years of hard work and perseverance came to fruition this month when the City of Ilwaco finalized a deal with forestry giant Weyerhaeuser that gives the city direct control of its own watershed.

Bear Ridge Community Forest now includes 210 acres of land and timber previously owned by Weyerhaeuser, plus an additional 178 acres of timber deeds on city-owned land. The 875-acre forest is being cited as a model for how small towns in Washington can preserve local water sources and create health, economic and environmental benefits for their community.

The sale, made possible through a combination of state and federal dollars Ilwaco secured in recent years, was formally announced by the city, Weyerhaeuser and the Trust for Public Land on Jan. 4. TPL is a nonprofit that collaborates with communities nationwide to create parks and protect public lands, with particular experience in facilitating public-private land transactions.

“To be able to do this, for a small municipality owning the timber and land within our municipal drinking watershed, is quite rare,” said Ilwaco City Councilor Matt Lessnau, who spearheaded the years-long effort.

The land involved is located roughly two miles north of Fort Columbia State Park in an area of the Willapa Hills long controlled by industrial logging companies.

Starting the conversation

Lessnau traced his interest in the acquisition back to a meeting he had with a member of the Washington Environmental Council at the March 2018 Rethinking Rural symposium in Port Townsend. Rethinking Rural, formed by Chinook’s Madeline Matson, is a national network of rural millennials who are focused on promoting growth and investment in their communities.

The WEC member brought up a 2015 study by the Columbia River Estuary Task Force (CREST), which suggested that Ilwaco should actively protect its watershed’s boundaries. The best way to do that, according to the study, was for the city to own both the property and timber rights around its Indian Creek Reservoir.

With Weyerhaeuser facing a mid-2020s timber-harvest deadline on the acreage, the city knew it needed to move relatively quickly to strike any such deal.

“It started to get really close,” Lessnau said. “It was like, ‘OK, this is getting too close. We need to at least start the conversation to see what options we have.’”

Even with no grants secured or funds set aside for the project at the time, positive meetings with agencies and organizations like Washington Department of Ecology, Sustainable Northwest and WEC gave Lessnau and the city confidence to pursue the multi-million dollar acquisition.

It was Max Webster, WEC’s Evergreen Forests Program manager at the time, who introduced Ilwaco to TPL, the group that shepherded the city through what turned out to be a years-long process. Lessnau called being matched with TPL “too good to be true.”

“It was like, ‘Hey, they’ll help you guys with this purchase and they won’t charge you anything,’” he said. “Like wait, what? No, that doesn’t happen, that’s not a real thing. And it turns out it is.”

Getting connected with TPL is when this venture started feeling real, according to Lessnau, who cited their pedigree and a productive working relationship with Weyerhaeuser on several prior successful land purchases for municipalities and tribes. “Now we have someone on our side who has the experience to get it done.”

State, fed support key

TPL coming into the fold allowed the city to turn its attention toward securing the necessary funding.

Webster told Lessnau that he saw an opportunity for Ilwaco to show the state Ecology Department the importance of supporting so-called “green infrastructure” acquisitions like the one CREST was suggesting.

“Traditionally through DOE, their grant-and-loan program had only ever funded those traditional infrastructure projects — either pipes in the ground or tanks above ground,” Lessnau said. “This was trying to break the mold a little bit, in using our project as ‘the one to get it done.’”

It ended up taking Ilwaco three tries and a healthy dose of persuasion to get the funding package it was looking for from DOE — a $500,000 grant in the summer of 2021, along with up to several million dollars in low-interest loans, which the city had previously been offered but without any grant funds.

At the time, Ilwaco had also been awarded a $600,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2020, as part of the USDA Community Forest and Open Space Conservation Program. In the spring of 2021, the city also received $721,000 in funding from the Washington State Legislature as part of its capital budget package for that legislative session.

The biggest slice of funding came in early 2022, with the passage of the federal budget. Courtesy of an earmark request from then-Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, the $1.5 trillion spending bill included $1.62 million for the project — far more than what Ilwaco had asked for in its funding application.

In the end, the city was able to avoid having to utilize any of the DOE loan it had received, with the sale consisting solely of grant dollars.

Crossing the finish line

Even with all of the necessary money in hand, closing out the acquisition proved to be a challenging hurdle in its own right.

In a news release, Weyerhaeuser said that third-party appraisals of the property in 2021 and 2022 fell short of expectations because of “inaccurate timber inventories and a below-market reflection of the land value.”

The company, TPL and independent contractors collaborated to work out the differences, and a third appraisal of the timber and land in 2022 met expectations and allowed the sale to move forward.

Each of the involved parties were tight-lipped throughout the latter stages of the process — until a couple of weeks ago. With the sale finalized, the three stakeholders in the project heralded the sale going through in early January.

Lessnau praised Weyerhaeuser and TPL for their perseverance in seeing the “extremely beneficial” project through to the finish line. “Obviously it took a long time, but I think everybody was engaged and committed to moving it forward. We’re excited to close it out.”

Weyerhaeusuer’s director of land asset management, Craig Crawford, said the company received fair market value for the land and timber, and pointed to the sale as being “a great example of the many ways we strive to be a good neighbor every day.”

Mitsu Iwasaki, TPL’s Northwest director, said the acquisition will have ripple effects for rural areas throughout the country and provide a new path for preserving watersheds without taking on significant debt.

“Small towns across the country are looking to Ilwaco as an example of how they can secure clean water for future generations,” he said in a statement. “Working forests combine jobs with environmental protection, and the Bear Ridge Community Forest shows how rural communities can work with public and private funders to control their clean water destinies.”

The Bear Ridge Community Forest, which now spans 875 acres following the acquisition, is one of over 30 that TPL has helped establish across the nation. The locally owned and managed forests are protected natural spaces that help communities maintain a source of revenue and employment via sustainable forestry and recreational tourism, and provide an environmental learning ground for local schools.

“These projects are popular right now, and keeping the city’s resources in the city’s control is huge,” Lessnau said. “The biggest driver [of the acquisition] is maintaining that water quality, and basically controlling timber harvests within the watershed. … All of our drinking water comes from surface runoff, so that’s what supplies that reservoir. If we have all of the trees and all of the ground covered, that filters that runoff.

“If you start removing trees — in any capacity, really — from those downslopes within the ridgeline, now you’re allowing more sediment to wash into the reservoir. Something historically that Ilwaco has struggled with was filtering that out and treating the water. So you’re adding cost; the more you have to filter your drinking water, the more cost you add to the operation of the water plant and, subsequently, to your ratepayers. This is an opportunity for us to keep this timberland — the critical portions of it — relatively intact so we can continue to stabilize the water quality.”

Endless opportunities

While the timber that is crucial to ensuring Ilwaco’s water quality won’t be touched by harvesting, other recently acquired and previously owned timber areas can be harvested to provide a new revenue stream for the city.

Along with bringing in much-needed dollars to the city’s coffers, targeted harvesting can also aid in sustainability efforts, Lessnau said.

“It is our intent to harvest — selectively — in order to replant more diverse native species to promote diversity and resilience within the watershed,” he said, noting that the timber on the newly acquired land is entirely monoculture hemlock planted in anticipation of harvest. “Maybe one bad bug comes around that just loves hemlock. That would be catastrophic.”

A re-replanting operation will get underway in the spring. An initial replanting was completed following a harvest that took place a couple of years ago, but the historic heat dome that settled over the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 2021 “nuked” many of the seedlings that had recently been planted.

Along with completing a “timber cruise” to more precisely determine how much value in timber the city now possesses, and subsequently putting in place a detailed forest operation plan, the city also expects to look into whether it is eligible for carbon sequestration projects, which are typically sold to offset carbon emissions elsewhere.

In terms of recreational tourism, Lessnau envisions establishing a network of hiking and mountain biking trails. Other nearby trails that the city could model its trails after include mountain biking trails at Klootchy Creek near Seaside, and hiking trails at Montesano City Forest.

“If you have intentional use, you drastically reduce the unintentional uses; the dumping, the trespassing, the vandalism, that kind of thing,” he said, adding he expects the city to continue working with TPL and Springboard Forestry, Ilwaco’s forestry consultant, to identify companies that can help them with trail designs.

“This would be a fantastic location — that five miles outside of Ilwaco — to develop another regional trail network to kind of bring some of those recreationists into the area to see what we have over here,” he said.

Beyond preservation, sustainability and economic possibilities, the educational aspect of having a working water plant within a community forest cannot be downplayed. The city hopes to collaborate with local school districts and community colleges about potential educational opportunities, with a focus on vocational occupations.

“This is right in our backyard, this is an opportunity to look at some chemistry, look at some environmentalism, look at some ecology and forestry,” Lessnau said. “It’ll be a working forest; there’ll be timberland management out there.”

The forest’s potential for allowing Ilwaco to control its own future are seemingly limitless.

“It’s a really good project, and I’m fantastically optimistic for the future of what that land can give to the city — both from a resource standpoint and an economic development standpoint,” Lessnau said.