The University of Toledo will use a new $897,557 award from the Great Lakes Commission to finish restoring a section of Swan Creek on university land north of the University of Toledo Medical Center, moving the project from engineering and design into full construction this month, UToledo announced.
The award is a subrecipient agreement with the Great Lakes Commission funded through its partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, UToledo said in its release. It brings total funding for the Swan Creek work to more than $1.2 million, following a 2023 award of more than $242,000 that paid for the project’s first phase.
Crews are expected to begin work in mid-November by clearing trees and building an access route to reach 1,700 linear feet of the creek. The route crosses property owned by neighboring ALRO Steel, whose willingness to grant the university access was essential to making the project possible, UToledo said. The construction itself is expected to take six to eight weeks, weather permitting.
The work itself is hands-on stream repair. “Primarily, what we’re going to be doing is removal of some log jams within Swan Creek. We’re then going to be placing some lock logs, which function similar to what a log jam would do, except that it controls erosion a little bit better,” Tim Niederkorn, UToledo’s assistant director of environmental health and radiation safety, who is leading the project, said in the university’s release. Crews will also build shallow, rocky riffles to aerate the water and install permanent log structures, similar in function to beaver dams, on a tributary stream.
Swan Creek flows toward the Maumee River, and the lower Maumee is one of 43 Areas of Concern around the Great Lakes — waterways in the United States and Canada identified as degraded by pollution and habitat loss. “We’ve previously received funding for engineering and design, now we have this new influx of funds for full construction,” Jill Estrada, a project manager at the Great Lakes Commission, said in the release.
Cherie Blair, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency’s Maumee Area of Concern coordinator, said in the release that the structures will hold stormwater on the floodplain so it soaks into the ground instead of rushing downstream, while the riffles give aquatic insects — a food source for fish — a hard surface to live on. About 30 of roughly 37 aquatic habitat projects in the Maumee area are finished, Blair said, and the rest, apart from sediment projects, should be complete by the end of 2027.
For UToledo, the project continues more than two decades of work on the waterways crossing its campuses; the university restored more than 3,500 feet of the Ottawa River through its Main Campus beginning in 2005. “Our responsibility doesn’t end at healthcare or education. It includes working with community partners to better the natural resources that we are entrusted with,” Niederkorn said in the release. Once the remaining habitat work is done, Ohio EPA will reevaluate stream health across the 787-square-mile area to determine whether the impairments that keep it on the Areas of Concern list can be removed.