FOLEY, Ala. - The next environmental project the city of Foley will begin regards the Wolf Creek stream.

    Leslie Lassiter — city environmental manager — hopes to restore the stream from behind the city Justice Center to Poplar Street, around 3,000 feet, to a natural water channel.

    The Foley City Council unanimously approved a resolution July 5 accepting the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program grant of $82,500 for the restoration project.

    The city is required to make a match, Lassiter said, but can use in-kind services to cover the match. An in-kind service grant match includes using employee wages and equipment use to match the total.

    Receiving the funding is the first phase in a large-scale project the city hopes to complete.

    "This grant is really an initial phase of a big project," Lassiter said, noting the project has been planned for around six months. "We will have a consultant do a natural stream design, which means they will have to go to other streams in the area to figure out the plane width, where the curves should be, ripples, pools, etc. Those are all components of the natural stream channel. They will try to mimic a nearby stream when they try to design this stream."

    After the design phase is finished, the stream will be built by the city's Public Works Department with the intention of slowing storm water that enters the channel.

    "They will take a narrow, deep channel and turn it into a wider, slower-moving body of water," Lassiter said. "When we get a lot of rain in Foley, that stream receives a lot of water so we're going to slow that water down before it goes down stream and give it a natural place to dissipate some of that energy."

    The hope is the stream becomes the home to fish and vegetation.

    "The dissolved oxygen level is very low. We'd like to get it back to its natural level…" Lassiter said.

    "This will be a good thing to restore that area," Councilman Ralph Hellmich said at the council meeting. "This may lay the groundwork for more moneys to come…"

    With the grant and the city's match, around $165,000 will be invested into restoring the stream, but around an additional $330,000 would be needed to complete the project, Lassiter said.

    "The total project, and this is a wild guess, would be in the neighborhood of $500,000 to do it all," Lassiter said.

    "We're going to be looking at several different grant sources."

    The hope is to make the area more aesthetically pleasing and add educational signage and connect a walking path to the Antique Rose Trail, Lassiter said.

    "In a perfect world, we hope to have a walking path down by the waterway and make it a better amenity for the community," Mayor John Koniar said.