The University of Toledo will rebuild 1,700 linear feet of Swan Creek north of the University of Toledo Medical Center under a nearly $900,000 award that moves the creek’s restoration from planning to construction. UToledo News reported that a new $897,557 subrecipient agreement with the Great Lakes Commission, funded through the commission’s partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, will cover the final construction phase and bring total project funding to more than $1.2 million.
The lower Maumee River, which Swan Creek feeds, is one of 43 Areas of Concern around the Great Lakes, identified as degraded by pollution and habitat loss, according to UToledo News. Cherie Blair, the Maumee Area of Concern coordinator for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, told UToledo News that impairments to fish habitat, wildlife reproduction and the small creatures living on stream bottoms are what keep a waterway on the list.
The new money follows a 2023 award of more than $242,000 from the Great Lakes Commission, through the same NOAA partnership, for engineering and design. “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, told UToledo News. UToledo previously restored more than 3,500 feet of the Ottawa River through Main Campus beginning in 2005.
Construction begins in mid-November, when crews will clear trees and build an access route to the creek. The route runs through the property of neighboring ALRO Steel, whose willingness to grant access UToledo News reported was essential to the project. The work will be led by Tim Niederkorn, UToledo’s assistant director of environmental health and radiation safety.
Once crews are in, they will remove log jams from Swan Creek and install lock logs in their place. The structures “function similar to what a log jam would do, except that it controls erosion a little bit better,” Niederkorn told UToledo News. Crews will also build shallow, rocky riffles to aerate the water and install permanent post-assisted log structures, which resemble beaver dams, on a tributary stream.
Blair told UToledo News the structures are expected to hold stormwater on the floodplain so it soaks in instead of rushing downstream, while the riffles give aquatic insects — a food source for fish — a hard surface to live on. The payoff for Toledo is a healthier creek on the city’s south side: less erosion, less sediment covering good habitat, and better conditions for fish and wildlife across the Maumee system.
The work is expected to take six to eight weeks, weather permitting, and it is one of two aquatic projects under construction this fall in the Maumee Area of Concern. Blair told UToledo News about 30 of roughly 37 aquatic habitat projects in the area are finished, and all but the sediment projects should finish by the end of 2027, when Ohio EPA will reevaluate stream health. “Our responsibility doesn’t end at healthcare or education,” Niederkorn told UToledo News.