Jacob Moore / jacob@chronline.com
The Chehalis Basin Collaborative for Salmon Habitat visited the Lewis County Board of Commissioners Tuesday to share information about its work and encourage future engagement.
Kirsten Harma, coordinator for the collaborative, presented to the board during its Aug. 26 meeting with support from Lewis County citizen representative Bob Russell.
The two presented on the value of the organization and the work it has done in the last year.
Harma began her slideshow presentation by first introducing the collaborative, which until recently was called the Chehalis Basin Lead Entity, along with its background and what separates it from other organizations that do fish habitat work, such as the Office of Chehalis Basin.
The lead entity program, according to Harma, was originally created by state legislation and started work in 2004, laying the groundwork for many other fish habitat groups. Members of the collaborative include Lewis, Grays Harbor and Thurston counties as well as the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation, the Lewis County Conservation District, regional and local fisheries and many more.
“Our group helps pull these people together to communicate. You’d be surprised how much even people within the same organization don't communicate. Imagine all of these organizations across the basin,” Harma said. “(We) really need this forum to share strategies, tell what they’re doing and come to an agreement.”
Harma highlighted the major roles of the collaborative, which consist of coordination and communication between its member entities, helping to allocate funding from the Salmon Recovery Funding Board for habitat restoration projects, and leading the charge on education related to fish habitat and restoration.
In 2025, the collaborative received just over $1.1 million in funding from the Salmon Recovery Funding Board, which it allocated to two fish passage barrier correction projects, a stream restoration design, and a riparian planting effort covering more than 25 acres.
She added that each of those projects benefits five local fish species. Harma also touched on the specific education efforts the collaborative took in 2024, which included tabling at local events, hosting its own events and also guiding educational field trips for local schools. As part of the educational efforts, the collaborative visited four schools in Lewis County, including stops in Napavine, Onalaska and Chehalis.
“We have an outreach contractor …. that goes out into the community and is really, really active in making kids and adults aware of how rivers work, how floodplains work, what we need to do to protect our salmon and why we should care,” Harma said. “Ecology calls this the enabling environment. This is the future of people that will continue to care about our salmon and streams.”
By way of closing, Russell offered just a few words, highlighting the importance of the program and also asking the commissioners and the community to invest in both habitat restoration and protection as well as development.
“I’m extremely proud of our county and the way that they protect the critical areas, and what I will leave with is that, in this county, I believe we should do both,” Russell said. “We need to do industrial development and we need to protect the critical areas. They are not mutually exclusive.”
