The Office of Chehalis Basin (OCB) held the last of its major public tabling events at the Southwest Washington Fair last week during the six-day event.
The office teamed up with the Chehalis Basin Flood Authority to host a table under the grandstands and speak with community members about the work the OCB is doing to develop a long-term strategy to address flooding and habitat restoration in the upper basin.
The tabling sessions at the Southwest Washington Fair was the third of the group's major public outreach and tabling events and marked the end of the first phase of a larger outreach campaign.
The Office of Chehalis Basin already attended ChehalisFest on July 26 and the Grays Harbor County Fair that ran from July 29 to Aug. 2.
According to OCB Principal Planner Nat Kale, feedback received during the outreach events as well as during future events will play a role in the comparative analysis and final decision making being done to develop the long-term strategy for the basin.
“There’s more of an informal process in the sense that when we get those comments we talk about them internally,” Kale said. “More formally, what we’re doing is rolling up these comments that we hear at meetings … We're going to be compiling all of those and then creating a report that goes back to the board that says. ‘here’s all the feedback that we are getting from the community.’”
Following the tabling by OCB during fair week, the organization will start hosting open houses to talk about the work being done. An online open house platform will open up for nearly two months starting on Sept. 8 and closing Oct. 31.
In the same time period, the office will host two in-person community open houses, with the first being held at the Veterans Memorial Museum in Chehalis Sept. 25 and the second at Montesano City Hall in October. Both will start at 5 p.m. and are scheduled to last for more than two hours.
The end goal of the outreach and comparative analysis process is to provide Chehalis Basin Board members with a collection of data and reports that allow them to measure the pros and cons of projects and their impacts on flooding and habitat. The deadline for a final decision on long-term projects is set for the early months of 2026.
The entire process began in the spring when OCB, guided by its oversight authority the Chehalis Basin Board, set out to make a final decision on the group's long-term strategy.
After months of presentations and consideration of the options, the Chehalis Basin Board in June made selections of which projects they would actually consider pursuing, and with that kicked off a process called comparative analysis that will compare the impacts of proposed projects.
Possible projects include multiple proposed levees around Centralia and Chehalis, a flow-through dam near Pe Ell, potential changes to the Skookumchuck Dam and investments into habitat restoration and other local efforts.
After the package selection process, the comparative analysis began immediately by first asking members of the Chehalis Basin Board how they wanted to analyze their proposed projects.
The board and the Office of Chehalis Basin ultimately identified 15 different categories for analysis. Each is a different aspect that will be used to measure local impacts of a project. The categories fit into four groups: environment, economic, social and cultural. A miscellaneous group of additional categories that don't fit nicely into the others is also included.
Categories cover a range of subjects and areas that a large-scale project such as regional levees or a flood retention dam could impact. Examples include predicted impacts on infrastructure damage, salmon and steelhead health and cost-benefit and feasibility of projects.
Each category also comes with goals that lay out what the Chehalis Basin Board hopes projects will achieve. For example, the main goals cited for steelhead and salmon are to increase abundance, maintain biodiversity and protect weak stocks of salmon and steelhead.
According to documents from the Office of Chehalis Basin, impacts in each category will be analyzed in three different ways: quantitative, meaning looking at data and numbers; qualitative, meaning looking at lived experiences and values; and, finally, monetized, looking at the overall financial impact of a project, not just in how much it will cost to build but how much it would cost to maintain and if it could actually save people money in the long run.
According to Kale, ongoing work includes working with board members who will make the ultimate decision to understand what kind of statistics they want. Numbers of structures saved or numbers of different fish species are datapoints the board has considered in the past.
The office has also commissioned in-depth models on a variety of subjects. The modeling will allow board members to view maps and other graphics that show actual changes to things like water levels in floods or accessible fish passages.
“We’re running some of those models right now, and we're starting with hydraulic modeling, which is going to tell us about flooding,” Kale said. “What we're going to be moving onto next is the habitat modeling.”
For more information about the work being done by the Office of Chehalis Basin, including long-term strategy and the comparative analysis process, visit https://officeofchehalisbasin.com/lts/.
