It might take a new — and possibly permanent — tax to prevent Bend’s 101-year-old Mirror Pond from becoming speckled with mud flats.
The manmade water feature, located downtown along Drake Park, has sedimentation problems caused by silt flowing down the Deschutes River and settling on the bottom of the pond.
After several years of false starts and delays, officials thought they were closing in on a possible fix to the problem. But as a consortium of local businesses and governments prepares to sign a contract to fully study the various alternatives, it has discovered another snag.
It doesn’t have any money. Not even enough to pay for the study.
“We’re at a juncture we knew we were going to come up against,” said Michael McLandress, the project manager hired to oversee the current Mirror Pond alternatives analysis. “This is the albatross we’re all trying to negotiate with. How do we find a funding mechanism that will create long-term sustainable funding for Mirror Pond?”
Now discussions have reverted to forming a special taxing district that would collect property taxes to pay for the upcoming study. That money would also be used to pay for whatever fix the study calls for, in addition to setting money aside for future Mirror Pond maintenance and projects.
“It’s still very early in the discussion stages, but the idea would be to have a Mirror Pond tax district on the May ballot,” McLandress said. “We are just trying to determine if that’s even feasible at this stage.”
McLandress was hired last year after the city of Bend, the Bend Park & Recreation District, Pacific Power, William Smith Properties Inc. and the nonprofit Bend 2030 all decided to pool some resources to do a proper analysis of what should be done to Mirror Pond.
That analysis would piggyback on a 2009 study and also include wide-ranging community input that would be combined with a scientific analysis of various options to remove sediment from the pond.
Those options could include anything from leaving the pond as it is and allowing it to fill with sediment to removing the Pacific Power dam near the Newport Avenue bridge and allowing the river to flow free.
Previous discussions have focused on dredging the pond, which was last done in 1984 at a cost of $312,000. The 2009 study estimated any future sedimentation solution could cost anywhere from $2 million to $5 million.
After receiving two proposals over the summer for a new alternatives analysis, the group decided it would hire Cascade Environmental Group of Portland. Though contract negotiations are ongoing, the current estimated cost of this study is around $540,000.
Even though the analysis was planned to be broken into two parts — with the first phase costing about $200,000 and the second coming in around $300,000 — McLandress said “it looks like we don’t even have the funding to get the entirety of the first phase going.”
One option he is looking at, however, is breaking apart the first phase into two more segments, with the first being the public outreach and community involvement portion. By doing that, he said, the project can at least continue to move forward while officials look for funding sources.
“This is the furthest we have ever gotten in this process,” McLandress said. “(But) there’s a budget there that we don’t have.”
Dozens of Bend residents turned out at an open house Thursday, taking an opportunity to weigh in on plans for the city’s next riverfront park.
The Bend Park & Recreation District is on an aggressive schedule to begin construction on the park at Miller’s Landing, across the Deschutes River from McKay Park, by next spring or summer.
Thursday, the district invited the public to view three concept drawings of what the nearly five-acre park could include and to offer their feedback.
Robin Laughlin, project manager for the district, said the public has expressed a preference for a lower-intensity park than McKay Park, the grassy expanse just downstream from the Colorado Avenue spillway popular with summer river floaters. All three plans call for much more limited river access than at McKay Park, with native plants covering the majority of the area along the water’s edge.
Laughlin said three concepts — plans A, B and C — reflect diminishing degrees of development. While plan A features community gardens, a picnic shelter and three river access points, including an off-leash dog beach, plan C has only two small river access points and is dominated by native plants and grassy areas.
All three concepts include public restrooms, the feature most requested by participants at prior public input sessions.
No plans for skatepark
Despite extensive lobbying by skateboarders earlier this year, none of the concepts include a skate park. Bruce Ronning, the district’s director of planning and development, said the district is actively looking for a place to locate a new skate park on the west side, but doesn’t believe it would be a good use of limited riverfront park space.
Laughlin said the district is likely to mix and match different elements from all three concepts in developing its official master plan this winter.
Two design elements captured much of the attention from participants in the open house, who left their comments on sticky notes tacked up next to images of the three concepts: the off-leash beach included in Plan A, and parking in the alley behind Gilchrist Avenue, included in plans A and C.
Both plans were unpopular.
Bob Almquist, who lives on Gilchrist Avenue, said while he has no problem with dogs, they don’t mix well with the park’s focus on boating and floating. A frequent kayaker, Almquist said he’s vulnerable to being tipped over by swimming dogs when he’s in his boat. Off-leash dogs are unlikely to remain on the designated beach, he said, and are likely to cut through the proposed stands of native plants, damaging the plants and creating erosion of the banks.
Almquist said he’s mixed on parking along the Gilchrist Avenue alley. While a parking lot off the alley could slow traffic, he said, it could also create conflicts with the walkers and cyclists who use the alley.
Dagmar Eriksson, who lives on the bluff overlooking the park site, said she leans toward plan B as the best way to both provide river access and preserve riparian areas. She said she often sees boaters who launch or land from the site damaging the banks by pulling their boats through the bushes along the banks, and would like to see designated launch sites at the future park.
Eriksson said she thinks an off-leash area would create conflicts with other users of the park. Across the river at McKay Park, too many dog owners already let their dogs run free and fail to pick up their waste, she said.
One participant left a note suggesting the development of an off-leash beach doesn’t go far enough.
“This should be a dog sanctuary,” the note read. “The anti-dog people are giving Bend a bad name.”
Eriksson and Almquist both said they expect the park district will do a good job, and that any park is a more welcome addition to the neighborhood than the residential development that had been proposed for the site just a few years ago.
In 2006, Brooks Resources and the Miller Lumber family were given approval to build 37 townhomes on the site. Economic conditions stalled the project, and late last year, the Trust for Public Lands purchased the property in order to transfer it to the park district.
“This is just frosting on the cake, the fact this is a park and not condominiums,” Almquist said.
The park district is continuing to accept public input on the Miller’s Landing project.
This undated archive photo, taken looking upstream from the east bank at about where the Newport Avenue bridge is now, shows the Deschutes River at what is now Mirror Pond. The photo, likely taken before the dam was constructed in 1910, shows a wilder, free-running river, an undeveloped west bank and the land that would become Drake Park, at center. Courtesy Deschutes County Historical Society
For a century, Mirror Pond has been a focal point of Bend and the backdrop to images of the city.
It isn’t a natural part of the city. Mirror Pond is man-made, formed in 1913 with the construction of a hydroelectric dam near the Newport Avenue bridge.
And the slow water flowing by Drake Park comes with problems — sediments and aquatic plants have built up behind the dam, leaving smelly muck exposed when the river is low.
The pond was dredged in 1984, and this winter a group of local government and business representatives decided to hire a consultant to lead an effort to examine ways to clean up Mirror Pond in the future. No one has yet determined what those alternatives will be, but the plan is to encompass a range of ideas.
One option could be to remove the dam and turn Mirror Pond back into a free-flowing section of the Deschutes River.
“When we look at a project like Mirror Pond, we really try to put all of the crazy ideas on the table,” said Ryan Houston, executive director of the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council. “Everything from removing the dam, at one end of the spectrum, to doing nothing and sitting on our hands. And (we) try to ask all the questions — what would happen?”
No one knows for sure what the river flowing by Drake Park would look like if the hydroelectric dam was torn down. The dam itself generates enough power for about 800 homes, and removing it could upend existing ecosystems, upset adjacent property owners or move sedimentation problems downstream, according to some involved with the Mirror Pond issue.
But returning the pond to a river could also present opportunities to create new wildlife habitat or park space, and allow for a more natural river through downtown Bend.
“Mirror Pond has kind of been an icon of Bend ever since it was built,” said Don Horton, executive director of the Bend Park & Recreation District. “And it would really change the character of Drake Park and the downtown area if it was to be more free-flowing.”
The park district, along with the city of Bend, William Smith Properties and Pacific Power, which operates the hydroelectric dam, have hired Michael McLandress, of Brightwater Collaborative LLC, to look for funding and subcontractors to examine possible solutions for Mirror Pond.
Removing the dam is an option that the analysis will probably address, along with the effects of doing nothing, Horton said.
But the most realistic option is somewhere in the middle, he said.
If the hydropower dam was removed, one way to gauge what Mirror Pond would look like is to dig up photos taken before the dam was installed, Houston said.
“Really what it shows is that that’s a fairly gentle section of river,” he said. “The slope is not too steep, and the water’s not moving too fast.”
Without the step currently created by the dam, the river would smooth out its slope along the stretch between the Colorado Avenue Dam and the dam downstream by Portland Avenue, he said.
It’s not that big of a drop, he said, so there probably wouldn’t be fast water like at the First Street Rapids, Houston said. Instead, Mirror Pond would probably look more like the section of river that flows under the Bill Healy Bridge on the south end of Bend.
Currently, Mirror Pond creates a bulge in the Deschutes River as it goes through Bend, he said. Without the dam, that would narrow out in parts, probably by about 40 percent in some sections.
“As the water moves through more quickly, the channel is getting narrower and perhaps deeper,” Houston said.
A narrower river channel would expose big mudflats, he said — but that could just be temporary.
“This is where it takes some imagination and some landscape restoration planning,” he said.
There’s a gooey layer of muck currently lining Mirror Pond, he said. And if a new, narrow route for the Deschutes River is created, some of that would be exposed, and probably would have to be removed. After that, restoration workers could create wetlands, riparian habitat, extend the grass of Drake Park, or put in a boardwalk or dock for kayaks and canoes — whatever the community decided to do, Houston said.
The watershed council isn’t proposing any one solution to the problem of sediment building up in Mirror Pond, Houston said, noting that it’s a complicated issue as well as one that’s sensitive politically, economically and ecologically.
“No matter what we propose, there’d be a whole series of trade-offs, good and bad,” he said.
Matt Shinderman, senior instructor of natural resources at Oregon State University-Cascades Campus, said that as an angler, he’d be thrilled to see a river flowing by Drake Park. People could take their kids to the park to fish, he said. But others also enjoy the still, pond-like atmosphere of Mirror Pond.
One potential problem with removing the dam, Shinderman said, is that it could simply flush the sediments — and the water- quality issues that go with sedimentation — to an irrigation diversion dam near The Riverhouse.
“It would just shift the problem downstream,” Shinderman said.
And although the dam is a man-made object, the ecosystem above and below it has adapted over the last century, he said. A free-flowing river would alter existing currents, pools and other wildlife habitat, he said, possibly displacing populations of insects, fish and birds — although others could adapt in the future.
“When you remove dams that have been in place for a long time, you often don’t get what you thought you were going to get,” he said.
Another potential issue is the dam itself.
The 14-foot-high hydroelectric dam at Newport Avenue was built in 1913, and has been operated by Pacific Power or its predecessor companies since 1930, said Tom Gauntt, spokesman with Pacific Power. It creates a mile-long, shallow reservoir behind it, he said.
And the water that flows through it creates about 1.1 megawatts of power — enough to supply electricity to about 800 typical houses.
Removing the dam is “very hypothetical,” he said, and there is no existing proposal to do so.
The company has removed dams before, he said, including the Powerdale Dam on Hood River. That dam was a little larger than the Newport Avenue Dam, he said, and was also in an isolated canyon — not right in the middle of a populated area. It cost more than $3 million to remove the dam, he said, noting that costs vary for different projects.
Removing a dam takes a lot of time, he said — one project has been ongoing for more than a decade — as well as agreement between multiple federal, state, local and tribal entities.
“There’s many, many parties when something’s been part of a community for 100 years,” he said. “Even if everyone agrees, it’s a lengthy process.”
And some people, including some who live along Mirror Pond, are adamantly opposed to removing the dam.
“I’d absolutely go crazy. Mirror Pond is Bend,” said Charliene Wackerbarth, who has lived along Mirror Pond for almost 20 years. “That’s the signature and, to me, the most important part.”
People float down to the pond in the summer, or canoe and kayak in it, she said, while families picnic along the pond’s edge.
Changing the pond into a river might make her lawn bigger, since their property extends to the middle of the river, but Wackerbarth said that’s not worth it.
“I personally would fight this,” she said, adding that she would prefer an option that involves dredging the sediments. “Keep it as this gorgeous, wonderful lake.”
Thomas Ackerman said his opinion may be biased, because he lives along Mirror Pond, but said he wouldn’t want to see it changed to a river.
“I think it’s a total jewel for the city, and to see it gone would be really sad,” Ackerman said. “It’s so beautiful, I feel like it was meant to be that way even though it is a man-made pond.”
Creating mudflats by switching from a pond to a narrow river could draw in more mosquitoes, he said, and he wondered whether people would have to drag canoes through the silt to get to the river.
“I love going out there on a canoe and paddling around,” he said. “Even though it’s shallow, it feels like a big body of water that you’re out on.”
It’s hard to estimate what effect removing the dam might have on property values along Mirror Pond, said Steve Scott, principle broker with Steve Scott Realtors in Bend.
If residents kept their ownership of the land up to the river’s edge, it might not affect property values too much, he said. But if the land between the old Mirror Pond high-water mark and the new Deschutes River high-water mark was turned into public land, and people lost their direct waterfront property, that would greatly decrease the value, Scott said.
Along Mirror Pond, some people do own the land out to the river’s center line, said Aaron Henson, senior planner with the city of Bend.
The properties along the river are subject to the city’s waterway overlay zone. One part of the overlay zone states that along the riparian corridor, the city reviews any kind of development applications to make sure the projects won’t disturb wildlife habitat and vegetation.
By Mirror Pond, that corridor is 30 feet from the ordinary high- water mark, he said — and if Mirror Pond narrows to a free-flowing river, that corridor could shift as well, unless the city changes the zoning language.
Along the Deschutes River, there are also setback requirements that range from 40 to 100 feet, he said, as well as requirements about the types of building materials that people can use. Those could be shifted with a new ordinary high- water mark as well.
There will be community meetings and outreach in the future to discuss the different alternatives for Mirror Pond, said McLandress, who is working on hiring a subcontractor to examine different options. And until that analysis of options is done, it’s hard to say what Mirror Pond would look like under different conditions.
But no matter what happens to Mirror Pond, beer-lovers don’t have to worry about the brew that bears its name.
Mirror Pond Pale Ale is Deschutes Brewery’s No. 1 selling beer, said Jason Randles, digital marketing manager with the Bend brewery. It’s sold in 16 states and one province.
“Most people (who drink Mirror Pond) have never been to Bend. The brand, and the beer, lives beyond the actual place,” he said. “We’ll just keep making the beer.”
Ask most Bend residents and most visitors what they think of when they think of Bend, and one thing is sure to top the list. That’s Mirror Pond, along which Drake Park runs through the heart of Bend.
Yet the pond is in danger of disappearing even as city government and others continue to study the issue to death.
The newest attempt to decide what to do with the pond, which is becoming ever more clogged with silt, was announced this week. The city, the local park district, Pacific Power and William Smith Properties have combined resources and hired a project manager to study the problem and analyze possible solutions. Hooray! Let’s all just hope it doesn’t take Michael McLandress of Brightwater Collaborative LLC six years to complete his work.
That’s how long a current fix to the pond’s silting problems has been in the planning stages. First news accounts of the effort appeared way back in 2004, and they’ve cropped up every few months since then. Unfortunately, the planning continues apace while we seem no nearer an answer than we were six years ago. Most recent estimates of the cost to fix the pond were $5 million, though that may well have changed by now.
Contrast all that with the last dredging of the pond, which occurred in 1983. Neighbors along the pond got together and came up with a plan to remove the silt that had built up there; they went to City Council, got the plan approved and the project was done in under a year. Total cost? Just about $300,000.
Clearly, Bend is a more complicated place today than it was way back in 1983. Any plan to clear silt — the product, in part, of fluctuating river flows that occur when water is impounded upstream — must include a variety of options from which to choose. Those options no doubt will cover the spectrum from doing nothing to a full-scale attempt to restore the pond to what it looked like when it was created in 1910 after Pacific Power built the dam on its south end.
In reality, though, doing nothing is really not an option, nor are other possibilities that do not restore the look of the pond. It’s simply too important a part of Bend and its history to be allowed to disappear under silt and vegetation. That may be more “natural,” but natural is hardly the goal in this case, or, if it is, it shouldn’t be. Rather, the goal should be to preserve this one part of Bend’s history that doesn’t center on timber or snow or agriculture but instead is valued and always has been valued simply because it is beautiful.
It’s unclear why, after six years, we’re not much closer to clearing the pond than we were in the beginning. We are not, however, and every added delay is likely to drive costs up still further. Knowing that, McLandress and those who hired him should set themselves an aggressive schedule and get the job done. Finally.
