Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 7, Issue 11, November 2003

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Ravenna Creek finally ready to see daylight

By JAMES BUSH

After a decade of efforts to bring Ravenna Creek up into the daylight, the North End stream is finally ready to grow.

An Oct. 9 Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation community meeting demonstrated clear consensus on a design to extend the creek another 800 feet along the existing youth baseball field at Northeast 55th Street. The major concern of neighbors was that adequate field dimensions be maintained to allow both youth baseball and softball play. At the other end of the stream, a separate parks department project is creating pools and a channel to extend the creek into neighboring Cowen Park. And the creek's waters, diverted for years into a sanitary sewer trunk line, will instead travel through a pipeline to join the University Slough just south of Northeast 45th Street, reconnecting the creek to its original outlet.

The creek's waters will, at least, be "going to the right place," says Kit O'Neill of the Ravenna Creek Alliance.

But O'Neill and other creek advocates have had to set aside their dream of restoring the creek on the surface between the park and University Slough. Hatched in the early 1990s, the proposal to daylight the southern stretch of Ravenna Creek gained support as O'Neill worked with University of Washington landscape architecture students to plan the extension and earned the support of numerous officials, including former US Senator Slade Gorton, who arranged $500,000 in federal funding for the project.

But support for a creek route which would cross University Village waned when the shopping center was sold to new owners. A proposal which would route the creek on city property never got the full support of the City Council and, when the time limit on the federal funding ran out in the late 1990s, creek supporters had only identified about half of the required $7 million to complete the daylighting project.

Still, the latest projects are a big display of respect for the landlocked watercourse, which once extended from Green Lake to Union Bay and drained a nine-square-mile section of the North End (it now provides drainage for about 80 acres of Cowen and Ravenna Parks) The northern portion of Ravenna Creek is long gone, having dried up when it was cut off from Green Lake during a 1911 draining and dredging project. The creekbed, which ran roughly along the current path of Ravenna Boulevard, was unceremoniously buried. The portion of the creek between Ravenna Park and Union Bay was partially culverted in the 1940s and later diverted into a sanitary sewer trunk line.

That decision proved to be a costly one for King County, as the stream fed millions of gallons of relatively clean water into the sewer system, boosting treatment costs and taking up line capacity, leading to combined sewer overflows during heavy rains. Connecting Ravenna Creek by pipe to University Slough will finally address that problem, as well as eliminating the indignity the creeks sudden terminus at a slant drain just north of the park's sports fields.

As biologist Judy Shepherd put it at a 1997 hearing on the daylighting proposal: "Everyone is diminished when you see Ravenna Creek go down that drain."

Even the modest daylighting project within the park and the pipeline connection to University Slough have proved contentious. Neighbors of the park last year endorsed a more ambitious plan which would move and realign the ballfield, then were infuriated when Parks Superintendent Ken Bounds vetoed the proposal, citing the large amount of construction required and objecting to the proposed removal of several mature trees. The University of Washington proved hesitant to allow creek water to be piped into University Slough, for fear the flow could disturb the clay cap over the former landfill on the site. Parks employees also took too literally Bounds' instruction to prepare a design for creek daylighting which would remove the ballfield: the resulting map was not only posted the web, but a sign was erected at the site stating that the field would be removed at a later date.

Friends of the field, including the leadership of the Roosevelt-University-Greenlake Little League, cried foul. Field backers packed a public meeting on the project held earlier this summer. Michael Clark summed up the mood of the meeting when he wrote this simple message on his comment form: "No Swamp. Keep the Ballfields."

Parks planners have gotten the message, assuring Dan Wood, RUG Little League president, at the Oct. 9 meeting that he would get the full 200 feet of outfield distance needed to keep the field in conformance with league standards.

The current daylighting proposal will at least add a little drama to the start of the creek's underground voyage. Artist Mark Brest Van Kempen has proposed a large funnel-shaped outfall at the creek's terminus next to the ballfield, where the water will crash down into the pipe. This is far preferable to the existing alignment, notes O'Neill, in which the creek "kind of goes around the corner and hides in the closet."

Could more of Ravenna Creek be daylighted at some future date? Sure, say supporters, who note that the spring-fed creek doesn't swell appreciably during storms (unlike creeks which handle a lot of street runoff), so it wouldn't carry much flooding risk. Ironically, says Ravenna Creek Alliance board member Thomas Whittemore, flooding was a major concern of University Village management when the creek was proposed to cross their property.

The plan to daylight the creek from the park to University Slough "remains a wonderful concept," says O'Neill, who says she hasn't given up on the eventual restoration of this urban stream.

"Water," she says, "tends to win."