This winter 2019 picture exhibits how shut residential improvement has come to the Salmon Creek Greenway. (The Columbian information)
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“It was breathtaking,” she stated.
That was 30 years in the past. Since then, McCarthy has made a life-style out of strolling the greenway path nearly every day. She used to maintain a weblog referred to as “Tales of Salmon Creek” in regards to the critters she noticed and other people she befriended alongside the best way. Lately, McCarthy, 85, walks rather less than she used to — simply a few miles a day — however her greenway view stays uninterrupted.
What she sees worries her, she stated. Her neighbors say the identical.
“We’re the complainers, along this road,” McCarthy stated with a chuckle.
They’re fearful about improvement pressures round and even throughout the greenway. They’re fearful about native beavers and beaver dams being eliminated, and about invasive nutria and nutria tunnels not being eliminated — all to the detriment of the flood plain. They’re fearful about ponds going dry and a couple of mysterious pipe that just lately turned up in one in all them: May it’s stealing water?
The Columbian introduced these considerations to Kaley McLachlan-Burton, spokesperson for Clark County Parks and Nature, and Denielle Cowley, program coordinator of the county’s Legacy Lands program. Legacy Lands, enacted in 1985, is a property-tax-funded drive to buy and protect outside locations. The levy is a little bit over 6 cents per $1,000 of assessed worth and has preserved 5,400 acres of county land up to now. Legacy Lands drove a lot acquisition of the Salmon Creek Greenway, Cowley stated.
“Legacy Lands properties are only for conservation purposes, for passive recreation and wildlife,” she stated. “There will not be any soccer fields or softball fields replacing the ponds. Taxpayers are buying these properties to conserve them, not make them into playing fields.”
