With the receipt of the original funding, ADF&G needed to develop a process to recruit, evaluate, select, contract, permit and implement protection and rehabilitation projects. The ADF&G also needed a way to reimburse private landowners for expenses incurred while constructing their rehabilitation and protection projects. The ADF&G entered a cooperative agreement with the USFWS to administer the reimbursement of funds to the landowner. The ADF&G has no grant program or authority in place to grant money. The USFWS had a mechanism to accomplish this task through its Partners for Fish and Wildlife grant program. This process and coordination is also currently used for the Kenai Peninsula Restoration Cost Share Program.
In June of each year, a public notice is placed in local newspapers and/or a letter is written to each landowner with property adjacent to a salmon stream to notify landowners that funding is available to protect and repair fish habitat on private and public lands along rivers on the Kenai Peninsula. Staff is available for pre-application consultation and to conduct field inspections to discuss the problems occurring on the landowner's property, historical and future land use needs or plans on the property, available rehabilitation techniques, funding sources and possible solutions to specific bank erosion problems. Each applicant signs a letter of interest and submits a completed agency applications, drawings and cost estimates for their project.
Upon receipt of the completed project application, ADF&G staff reviews the project for completeness. The projects are analyzed and rated using a decision matrix that staff developed. The matrix analyzes each project by rating the projects ability to remove harmful structures, protect natural habitat, provide fish habitat, stabilize stream bank, benefit habitat, and reasonable project solution, reasonable project cost, project success potential and benefits to adjacent property. Each criterion is weighted and a multiplier is used based on the importance of those criteria to provide and sustain important fish habitat components. Once the weighted ratings are calculated by criteria, a project score is tabulated and the projects are sorted from the best to the least habitat friendly project. Only a portion of the projects submitted for potential funding are approved dependent upon the amount of funds available for the year.
When the approved project list is finalized, all landowners whose projects were not funded are notified by letter indicating that they were not selected and given other options. Options included: not completing the project, requesting permitting of the project and constructing it without funding assistance from the Kenai Peninsula Cost Share Program, or revising the project and resubmitting the project for funding during the next funding cycle. The successful applicants are notified by phone and each landowner is informed about the contracting, permitting and reimbursement procedure involved in the Kenai Peninsula Cost Share Program.
Each selected project is contracted and permitted. A pre-construction field inspection is conducted to discuss the permit and stipulations, project construction and to identify ordinary high water (OHW) mark for the project. The projects is monitored during construction and modified as needed to insure project success. Once completed, each project receives a final inspection during which a final inspection report is written and given to the landowners and the USFWS. With the final inspection report and the receipts for project expenses incurred by the applicant, the USFWS reimburses the landowner by check or through direct deposit.
THE KENAI PENINSULA COST SHARE PROGRAM OBJECTIVES
The objectives of the Kenai Peninsula Cost Share Program are to: (1) remove structures that are considered detrimental to juvenile salmon, including jetties, bulkheads, riprap, rock gabions, car bodies and aircraft "marston" landing mats; (2) sustain areas that naturally provide good fish habitat, using cabled spruce trees, elevated light penetrating (ELP) gratewalks, dedicated developed trails and floating docks; and (3) rehabilitate human induced impacted fish habitat using bio-technical solutions including: root wad, brush layering and live siltation bank stabilization techniques in addition to vegetating banks using live staking, willow fascines and brush mattressing vegetation techniques (Muhlberg and Moore, 1998). The primary goal of the Kenai Peninsula Cost Share Program is to sustain and install the fish habitat components that are considered "good fish habitat" and to remove structures that impede juvenile salmon from up and downstream migration or deny juvenile salmon access to those good habitat components.
Fish habitat is defined in this application as the important habitat components needed for the rearing of juvenile salmon. Juvenile salmon are dependent on nearshore rearing habitats found along the banks of the Kenai River for a period from one to three years before outmigrating to marine waters. These freshwater fish habitat components include: (1) Overhanging vegetation for shade and source of terrestrial insects for food; (2) Inwater debris, both natural woody debris and installed structures, that; (a) decrease water velocity along the bank (optimum water velocity for juvenile salmon is less than 0.6 feet per second); (b) provide a media for benthic macroinvertebrates which are a food source and; (c) provides inwater cover to escape from avian and piscine predators; and (3) Undercut banks that provide shade, slow velocity cells and protection from predators.
