Officials Work to Improve Boardman River Health – But Face Constraints

The Traverse City Downtown Development Authority (DDA) and City of TC are working on multiple fronts to improve the Lower Boardman River – including habitat and shoreline improvements, repairs to a deteriorating retaining wall, and public placemaking projects. However, one of the main challenges to the urban river’s health – its proximity to so many hard surfaces and buildings – is further constraining efforts because of restrictions on affecting the floodplain.

That was the takeaway from a Friday DDA meeting, where Senior Water Resources Engineer Janeen McDermott of GEI Consultants and river ecologist Brett Fessel of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians presented to board members. The DDA, GEI, and GT Band are collaborating on a $11.9 million grant project from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that includes two key components: a Leelanau County preservation project for the former Timber Shores property and restoration work along the Lower Boardman River. The first phase of river work is funded at $657,750, with another $1.61 million to follow assuming NOAA funding remains intact.

McDermott said the project team has spent the past year evaluating the river’s condition, dividing it into six “reaches” or sections between Boardman Lake and the mouth at West Grand Traverse Bay. Work has included boat and walking assessments, along with topographic and bathymetric surveys. The shoreline is pretty “armored,” McDermott said, with significant sheet piling, concrete walls, and riprap and “very little natural vegetation” outside of Hannah Park.

There’s been a “significant deepening or lowering of the river bottom” since 2020, meaning “sediment has essentially been pushed out of the river,” McDermott said. From a stream health perspective, “there’s a lot that could be improved upon,” she noted. GEI is developing recommendations on over a dozen habitat improvement options, including adding riffles, pools, wood, boulders, lunkers (which are similar to pallets and provide fish with safe shelter), and nearshore tree plantings along the Boardman.

However, a key challenge in making those improvements is a restriction on disturbing the river’s floodplain under the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) and FEMA. “It gets really tricky in this part of the river,” McDermott explained. “Because there are insured buildings within the 100-year water surface elevation…that means essentially anywhere within the floodplain, you cannot have more than 0.005 of a foot of water level rise.”

That means any improvements that could potentially slow the Boardman’s flow or roughen its banks – even if healthier for the river – would likely not be “permittable” if they increased the rise even slightly, McDermott said. The grant work has now slowed – McDermott called it an “unprecedented delay” – as the team waits on hydraulic modeling required for all improvements. “We are at the whims of FEMA right now,” she said.

Fessel expressed bemusement at the “complexities of this permitting process,” pointing out the irony of the restriction. “We're beholden to a no-rise condition within the floodplain to add basically complexity to the channel for ecology, for habitat,” he said. “Over the years, there has been infrastructure permitted that is right within the floodplain that I guarantee would have caused a rise situation. I have trouble sometimes balancing those two. It's almost a bureaucratic thing through EGLE.”

The restriction could have implications for other river projects. At their November 9 meeting, Traverse City commissioners are set to discuss the retaining wall along the Boardman River in the 100-block alley of Front Street downtown. A recent report flagged the wall as being in “serious” condition, requiring both short and long-term fixes.

That work could be coordinated with both the NOAA habitat improvements and a DDA placemaking project to redesign the riverwalk area, including a remodeled J. Smith Walkway, new pedestrian amenities in the alley and parking lot, and a new pedestrian bridge. The existing bridge leading to the farmers market is deteriorating and reaching the end of its useful lifespan.

When the DDA board asked about the rise restriction impacting various river projects, McDermott said it’s a “case by case situation” but “certainly needs to be a significant thing that is evaluated early on in a project.” She noted that sometimes two projects happening in proximity that independently may pass the restriction test can be determined by EGLE to have “compounding impacts” when considered together. However, there’s also a strategy in combining river projects where some improvements may cause a slight decrease and others a slight rise where one can “offset” the other, she said.

Either way, continued collaboration on communication and timing will be important. “Because of all of the work that’s happening on the river, with the wall, with the new bridge, with these habitat options, I think that does need to be a consideration at the city level of the timing of those and how they might be viewed by the permitting agencies,” McDermott said.