This story by Tommy Gardner first appeared in the News & Citizen on Sept. 14.
Morristown’s Oxbow Riverfront Park, heavily damaged in July flooding, is once again open to the public, and there are plans to make it a little more flood resistant.
The Morristown Selectboard this week approved planting potentially hundreds of trees along the banks of the Lamoille River in Oxbow Park, a narrow peninsula at the north end of Portland Street that over the past decade has become a popular community gathering area for soccer and Ultimate players, concerts, an active community garden and more.
That whole area was underwater in the early morning hours of July 11, as the river jumped its banks and tore up the parking lot, soccer fields and basketball courts, swept away those gardens and left the lawn covered in riverbed silt.
Peter Danforth, director of the Lamoille County Conservation District, called the newly resurrected Oxbow a “blank template” that is a good candidate for riverbank trees, known as riparian buffers.
Selectboard vice chair Don McDowell agreed.
“Building up that riparian zone and the streambank area and protecting it is only going to buy us a lot of time for the Oxbow,” McDowell said. “Because the river owns it right now and we need to give it a chance.”
Riparian buffers, those oft-purposeful plantings, bolster riverbanks to hinder erosion and mitigate runoff unto the water. Danforth said the conservation district would, with the participation of town highway crews and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, scope out the area to determine how many trees and what kind could be planted to help shield the Oxbow.
He said a program called Trees for Streams has enough funding to plant 300-400 “stems” — trees, saplings or bushes — per acre, but could double that if the federal fish and wildlife department would contribute a matching grant. According to Danforth, the Trees for Streams program is jointly funded by Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, the Lake Champlain Basin Program and its Canadian counterpart, PUR Project, and the national fish and wildlife service.
The town would not be on the hook for any of the cost but would sign an agreement with the conservation district to manage things once the vegetation reaches a suitable maturity.
McDowell, a retired high school science teacher, said he’d like to see Peoples Academy students get involved with the tree planting, and Danforth agreed.
“I would like to make it a springtime, hundreds-of-volunteers-type event where people come down and they really kind of own the park,” Danforth said.
Tricia Follert, the town’s community development coordinator and arguably the park’s biggest cheerleader and largely responsible for making the Oxbow a vibrant town recreation resource, said she agrees “110 percent” with getting students on board.
“We as a community will never lose by having kids involved,” Follert said. “It teaches kids pride in their community, and you’ll have less problems.”
Mother Nature wasn’t the only one causing problems at the Oxbow; before the flooding, police were dealing with acts of vandalism and late-night drug deals at the park.
Follert said she was happy with the job that excavation company Dale E. Percy did with rebuilding the parking lot and clearing most of the silt from the field, and with the town highway department for re-seeding grass in time to give it a fighting chance before winter.
She said soil tests in the community garden came back clean and she’s meeting with the community garden folks soon to see about regrouping and doing some sort of winter planting so, when next spring comes, the garden area will be fertile and ready to go.
“If we don’t have enough money in the budget, there are plenty of businesses that would chip in,” she said.
Road erosion
The Oxbow may have suffered the most outwardly apparent flood damage, but innumerable dirt roads and other town and state highways throughout the state also saw damage that might not have been as widely reported or even visible to the everyday motorist.
The selectboard Monday agreed to hire Burlington-based Watershed Consulting to develop a stormwater management plan for Morristown’s 102 miles of town highway and to develop a road erosion inventory as required by Act 64, Vermont’s Clean Water Act.
The law requires towns to have a Municipal Roads General Permit, issued by the state Agency of Natural Resources, for discharges of stormwater from those town roads, both paved and unpaved.
According to Watershed Consulting’s project bid proposal, the firm will collect data such as slope angle and “hydrologic connectivity” status — the scientific term for the rate and frequency for materials being swept from a road during a rainstorm.
The firm’s bid came in at roughly $29,500, and the aim is to have the work done by the end of the year so the town can qualify for an $8,000 grant from the Lamoille County Planning Commission. The other firm responding to the town’s request for proposals was Fitzgerald Environmental Associates, which bid roughly $31,500.
Interim town administrator Jason Luneau said the regional planning commission performs this type of work for eight of the 10 Lamoille County towns, but Morristown and Stowe, the two largest towns, do their own road inventories. He said he reached out to the regional planners for guidance on which outfit to choose but couldn’t get them to sway him one way or the other, nor did they offer any red flags about either.
“It’s pretty much apples to apples. This one’s just a couple thousand cheaper,” he said, referring to Watershed Consulting’s winning bid.
