DAPHNE. Alabama – Fourteen months after the finalization of the $100,000 D’Olive Watershed Management Plan, officials say it’s still too early for benchmarks. Meanwhile, time marches on toward 2020, a year that the plan suggests the watershed will likely reach 100 percent “build-out,” a circumstance that may render future storm water mitigation practices fruitless.

Supporters of the plan say the data it provides is invaluable and is currently being used to seek funds for priority restoration projects. Others believe the 470-page report can hardly be called a plan at all, and that while its data is significant, political and economic realities will prevent the most necessary measures from ever being implemented.

When it was released by Thompson Engineering in 2010, the D’Olive WMP identified 10 percent of the streams in the relatively small watershed as “substantially degraded.” Another 18 percent were showing early indicators of erosion and nearly 35 percent were deemed at risk in the future. Storm water induced erosion has persisted in the watershed since the 1970s, according to the report, but intensified with the building boom over the past two decades.

In the meantime, excessive storm water runoff has filled 70 percent of Lake Forest Lake’s volume with silt, destroyed nearly all native grass beds in D’Olive Bay, and on different occasions has threatened to undermine two major transportation corridors and at least one private residence. To begin to combat the problem, officials are seeking grants to repair a section Joe’s Branch in Spanish Fort that the report characterizes as having the “most severely impacted” wetlands in the watershed.

Ashley Campbell, environmental programs manager for the City of Daphne, said she expects the project to receive an Alabama Department of Environmental Management grant within the next few weeks.

“This is potentially a $1 million stream restoration that’s the first major project to come out” of the WMP, Campbell said. “It’s a priority because a head cut on the stream can take out Highway 31.”

Although the entire Joe’s Branch project area lies with Spanish Fort city limits, Campbell said Daphne was taking an interest based on being downstream from the site.

“One thing you learn about a watershed, is it doesn’t honor political boundaries,” Campbell said. “So we’ve had a great effort with the City of Spanish Fort to coordinate our efforts.”

Campbell said preliminary plans for Joe’s Branch include using a relatively new technique known as “regenerative storm conveyance restoration,” which essentially improves the stream’s ability to move and filter water. The WMP also suggests stabilizing and maintaining steep upland slopes and removing as much as eight acres of accumulated sediment from areas north of Bass Pro Drive.

Timber Creek resident Chester McConnell, a wildlife biologist who said he’s worked on more than 100 watershed plans over the years, said the restoration of Joe’s Branch is misguided and the D’Olive WMP is short on solutions.

“Unless you focus on the root of the problem, and that is excessive storm water runoff, any stream restoration effort is going to fail,” McConnell said. “You’ve got to stop runoff and make strong regulations and enforcement first, or you can throw the whole plan in the garbage.”

McConnell referenced a recent stream restoration project on D’Olive Creek, one which he claims the City of Daphne undertook without public knowledge and against any recommendation of the WMP, as an example of how Joe’s Branch is being set up for failure. Campbell said the project in question was undertaken in an emergency situation, and the results were not ideal.

“That incident can be attributed to flooding during (tropical systems) Fay and Gustav, when box culverts running under I-10 undermined 20 feet in a day, so ALDOT declared an emergency and patched the culverts.” Campbell said. “We could have armored the whole thing and done the standard engineering practice and concrete and cemented that whole thing but instead of doing that we decided to try an environmentally friendlier restoration and it has had its problems. It’s not totally failed. It’s not like we said ‘give me money and let’s go play.’ This was an emergency.”

Campbell blamed abnormally high storm water discharges from Timber Creek as the cause of the failure. “In D’Olive Creek, water discharges with a normal flow of 10 cubic feet per second, but in July 16, when 8-10 inches of rain fell in Timber Creek, the rate was recorded at 1,732 cubic feet per second,” Campbell said. “That’s going to wash out some vegetation.”

“This went against everything the plan said about working on streams before runoff was addressed,” McConnell said. “Today that project is completely wiped out. Some people want to do something so bad, they’d rather do something wrong than nothing at all.”

Earlier this month, the Daphne City Council adopted a symbolic resolution supporting the D’Olive WMP. The Mobile Bay NEP expects the City of Spanish Fort and the Baldwin County Commission to do the same thing. But in Spanish Fort’s draft resolution, which initially read the same as Daphne’s, language regarding causes of erosion in the watershed had been struck out. McConnell said the omission speaks to the type of political infighting the plan will continue to face.

“These resolutions aren’t even asking the cities to do anything or spend any money,” McConnell said. “They are just symbolic. It shows that (municipalities) lack a spirit of cooperation and they don’t want to do anything with teeth in it.”

Spanish Fort Mayor Joe Bonner said last week that the language in the resolution suggested that the City might be to blame for some of the problems, language he didn’t think was appropriate.

“I don’t necessarily agree with that statement, that’s why I struck it out. I think we will vote on it Monday and there is no reason that statement can’t stay in there,” Bonner said. “I understand the need for us to collectively sit down at a table, I just don’t want to make decisions that will burden a future mayor and future council.”