TRAVERSE CITY — As construction looms for a selective fish passageway and replacement dam in Traverse City, pieces of the project’s bigger financial puzzle are coming into place.
Staging for removing the Union Street Dam and replacing it with a labyrinth weir, concrete channel and headworks collectively known as FishPass will begin Tuesday, according to a release from Traverse City Communications Manager Colleen Paveglio. Contractors will fence off the site around the dam and close parking Lot J for the rest of the project.
That’s expected to be a two-year build, said Marc Gaden, Great Lakes Fishery Commission’s executive secretary. The lead agency on the multimillion-dollar project, GLFC aims for FishPass to show how fish-sorting technologies can keep invasive species at bay while letting native ones migrate upriver.
Heavy construction will begin in July, which GLFC project manager Dan Zielinski said will start with sheet pile work to temporarily block off part of the dam.
All work for the project, including on land, should wrap in 2027, according to the city’s release. Access to the Boardman/Ottaway River will be restricted at various points, starting with moving a safety buoy line upstream of the Cass Street Bridge — a portage point at American Legion Park will be closed during construction.
Thursday’s announcement comes about a week after GLFC learned the state Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy will grant $1 million to Traverse City for the project, Gaden said.
“As luck would have it, we do have partners who have been willing to help us with finding the additional money that we need,” he said. “So that was good, and we still have other grants that we’ve put in applications for.”
Traverse City will get one of 22 Dam Risk Reduction Grants EGLE just awarded, ranging from $68,425 for White Cloud to help wrap a disposition study for White Cloud Dam on White River, up to $1.8 million for a string of repair and removal projects in and around Allegan on the Kalamazoo River and its tributaries, according to an EGLE release.
The state grant, combined with about $1.5 million more from the federally funded Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, helps close a gap that previously had GLFC considering pulling funds from other infrastructure projects it planned further in the future to keep a “shovel-ready” project like FishPass on track, Gaden said.
The grant relieves some of the pressure on other GLRC projects in the Great Lakes basin, but Gaden figured the project could still be several million dollars short for its components on land.
Those include park amenities on the south bank, a laboratory on the north bank and a bridge connecting the two to replace a sidewalk across the current dam, plans show.
Just how much more is needed depends on project leaders renegotiating the project’s work on land with contractors, Gaden said. That’s even with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers already having some money for onshore work on hand.
The GLFC forwarded those funds to the agency overseeing construction in 2021, the year construction was originally slated to begin. City resident Rick Buckhalter filed suit to challenge the project, arguing it repurposed city parkland for a non-park use, among other issues.
While then-13th Circuit Court Judge Thomas Power sided with Buckhalter and agreed the city charter requires a vote for such a change of use to proceed, a state Court of Appeals panel reversed that decision and the state Supreme Court declined Buckhalter’s request for appeal.
After the lawsuit ended in August 2023, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and lead contractor Spence Brothers renegotiated the contract, with the price increasing from $19.3 million to $23.2 million.
The GLFC already devoted more infrastructure money to the project than planned because of the cost increases, Gaden said.
“But I will tell you that that’s not a problem that I have alone,” he said. “Everybody on the planet who’s doing infrastructure is facing these kinds of issues.”
Other EGLE grants include $450,000 so the Antrim County Drain Commissioner can investigate the condition of the Bellaire Dam on the Intermediate River, and $185,000 to Boyne Falls for a feasibility study on the future management and potential removal of Boyne Falls Dam on the South Branch Boyne River.
Gaden said those grants, combined with Consumers Energy’s ongoing debates over the future of several of its dams, show how there are issues with dams throughout the Great Lakes basin. At the same time, removing them can open the way for invasive species like sea lamprey. Treating river systems to eliminate spawning populations of the parasitic, eel-like fish is another part of GLFC’s charge, and that costs a lot of money.
There are environmental tradeoffs, too — while lampricide is highly selective, being formulated to poison juvenile lampreys, it can still affect other aquatic species, Gaden said. Lake sturgeon are particularly sensitive to it, so the GLFC avoids treating rivers with sturgeon spawning grounds until the fall after their young move out.
Lampricide breaks down in sunlight in a matter of hours, but changes to a river’s chemistry can either render it less effective or make it too strong, Gaden said.
And rain is just one way that changes in the river’s pH can rapidly occur. It’s not unheard of for lamprey treatments to kill other fish, but the agency works hard to keep such incidents to a minimum.
A solution like FishPass could let fish like lake sturgeon — which can live for 100 years or more, reach lengths of six feet and weights in the low hundreds of pounds — upriver to spawn while keeping sea lamprey from breeding in the Boardman/Ottaway River’s watershed.