- By Dan Veaner
- Around Town
Print 
"Looking at things one spot by one spot is not a good way to go," says Darby Kiley who currently works half time for Lansing and the other half for the IO. "We started at a larger Cayuga Lake Watershed plan, and now we're looking at these sub-water sheds, and what are the best approaches to fixing things, leaving things alone, encouraging certain types of behavior, whether it's not mowing to the edge of a stream and planting some different trees."
The first project will study the possibilities for creating a wetland in Interlaken. $20,000 of the grant is targeted at this project that Kiley hopes will help prevent flooding in the village. "We are looking at trying to do some retention of water higher in the watershed," Kiley explains. "A trickle of a stream comes into the town, but when they have a lot of water they have problems and it washes out roads and ditches." By creating a wetland upstream of the flood areas, the hope is that water will be retained and controlled, reducing the flooding.
Closer to home, $75,000 is to be allotted to assessing Salmon Creek and strategies for mitigating flooding in heavy rain storms. In the past the County had money to assess Six Mile Creek, as well as Salmon Creek, the Cayuga Lake Inlet, and Fall Creek. This new study will be more extensive, and will go beyond the Tompkins County line. This will allow planners to create strategies for solving flooding problems that may be caused by conditions upstream of Lansing as well as along the local creek bed as it winds into the lake.
"What I asked for was to extend it into Cayuga County and do some more modeling and more technical work on this," Kiley says. "I go out with Highway Superintendent Jack French, and he says, 'This is a problem, this is a problem.' But are those really problems? How can we work with the ecology and infrastructure? What are the best projects for our money, can we get some cost estimates on those? And what are some priority areas?"
Kiley has already talked with hydrologists at Cornell, but says that it is not her intention to implement purely academic goals. Instead she says that the needs of municipalities must be merged with environmental concerns. "When you talk to academics about stream restoration, this whole idea of infrastructure -- it's really hard for them, but that's reality," she says. "People who are doing stream projects, that's usually the main goal. There is a lot of providing fish habitat, and that will be a part of it. But when it comes down to here's a stream and here's a road and here's a hill, something has to give."
The grant doesn't include money for local landowners to act on what they learn. But Kiley says it will provide an overall strategy that solves larger problems instead of patching them up piecemeal. A lot of private land is affected. "There is not money for on the ground projects. Some landowners come to the Town and say, 'Look, this stream is a big problem.' Instead of going piecemeal, 'Let's go help Mr. Smith because he's losing his bank, and his shed is falling into the stream,' then next year Mr. Jones comes and we're trying to fix his." When that happens she says there may be other funding opportunities that allow landowners to share the cost of solutions, or that even pay for entire projects. She sites a $650,000 project on Six Mile Creek in Caroline that was paid for entirely with grant funding.
Kiley says the grant really amounts to $210,000, because the terms of the $105,000 include 50/50 in-kind services by the municipalities. This means that local highway departments may be involved in adjusting stream beds or doing other work. $10,000 is reserved for project administration, which Kiley says will be at least partly contracted out.
----
v2i42