Mirror Pond is located in downtown Bend, Oregon between Veterans Memorial Bridge (the Newport Bridge) and the Colorado Avenue dam. Mirror pond is flanked by Drake, Harmon, Pageant, Brooks, Columbia, Miller’s Landing and McKay parks.
Bend’s Mirror Pond is more than a pond. It is an arresting symbol of the city that should not be lost. As the years go by, the pond is becoming a mudflat. Sediment has settled behind the dam.
Geese may soon waddle rather than swim. Paddles may be used to push, not row. Bend’s butterfly is becoming a caterpillar.
The effort to fix the pond has become as muddied as the pond.
The consultant hired to evaluate alternatives has been let go. There is no money for an analysis weighing alternative solutions, costing maybe $500,000 — let alone a fix which might add another $5 million.
Spending some money on a study for alternatives seems inescapable. Without a rigorous analysis, the state or the federal government would likely refuse approval of a fix. Without an analysis, chances of getting the federal government to chip in any money would be lost.
Where will the money come from?
The city of Bend doesn’t have it. The Bend Park & Recreation District may be doing relatively better financially, but it would be hard to argue that pond upkeep is part of its mission.
So the city is looking at creating a taxing district, perhaps putting it before voters in November 2012.
We’d vote for a taxing district to pay to dredge Mirror Pond. But is that what the tax would pay for? Would the tax sunset? Would the taxing district create a permanent, new bureaucratic fiefdom?
Some have proposed that the natural, permanent fix would be to remove dams and let the Deschutes resume its course. The pond would become a river again. There likely would be less need to come back in another 25 years and dredge again, though Bend’s centerpiece would be gone.
A taxing district for Mirror Pond has a chance, but only if voters know what they are paying for.
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.”
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.
Officials from local government and the private sector recently teamed up to hire someone who they hope can find a solution to the long-standing sedimentation problem in Bend’s Mirror Pond.
The pond, which was created in 1910 after the construction of the Pacific Power and Light dam on the Deschutes River near Newport Avenue, is considered by many to be a crown jewel of downtown Bend.
But over the years, increased deposits of silt from upstream have essentially clogged the pond, creating shallow mud flats that have altered its aesthetic character while also contributing to water quality problems on the river.
To find a fix, the city of Bend, the Park & Recreation District, Pacific Power and the company behind the Old Mill District, William Smith Properties, pooled some money to pay for a project manager who will now study the problem and find out how much it would cost to hire someone to then analyze the various options to get rid of the sediment.
“We need someone to sort of carry the ball,” City Manager Eric King said. “None of us (has) the resources on our respective staffs to dedicate to this project.”
In November, the group, working through the nonprofit, Bend 2030, decided unanimously to hire Michael McLandress of Brightwater Collaborative LLC to spearhead the Mirror Pond sedimentation project over the next year.
McLandress has lived in Bend for the past six years, and before that was in the San Francisco Bay area. Most recently, he was the construction project manager for the 67,000-square-foot Miller Elementary School in Bend that became the first Oregon school east of the Cascades to receive a gold certification in Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design from the U.S. Green Building Council.
“There was a consensus among the four funding partners that he was the best guy for the job,” King said. “He definitely has a project management background, which is what we were looking for, and he has kind of immersed himself in the community.”
The contract between Bend 2030 and Brightwater Collaborative LLC is for $44,100, and goes through the end of next year. As a part of the deal, McLandress will have to review and refine the cost estimates and scope of work outlined in a 2009 study that was prepared by the city, Upper Deschutes Watershed Council and Portland consulting firm ICF Jones & Stokes. That study found it could cost up to $5 million to finish work on a solution for Mirror Pond’s sedimentation issue.
While McLandress’ contract does not call for him to actually come up with the various solutions — which could range anywhere from dredging the pond to removing the Newport Avenue dam to doing nothing and letting nature take its course — he will be responsible for finding a firm to do that study. He will also be involved in finding the funds to perform that alternatives analysis, which some have estimated could cost up to $500,000.
Matt Shinderman, who is a Bend 2030 board member and professor of natural resources at Oregon State University-Cascades Campus, said the hefty cost of the alternatives analysis is one of the major reasons officials wanted to hire a third party like McLandress to scrutinize figures and come up with a refined budget. He added that even if McLandress’s review doesn’t change anything, it is warranted because it’s such a lofty project with a number of different facets.
“It’s just a really complicated project, and as much as I would like for there to be a neat and tidy solution, you’re dealing with almost 100 years of legacy there that you can’t make that go away,” Shinderman said. “I think the group is really interested in not rushing the process because it is highly visible. It’s a big deal, and I think there’s genuine interest in coming up with a long-term viable solution that kind of maximizes the net benefits.”
Perhaps the easiest, and certainly most visible, culprit of Mirror Pond’s sedimentation problem is the dam at the Newport Avenue Bridge. The dam slows the movement of the water and whatever sediment that might be in it, causing the sediment to build up along the edges of the pond. But studies have found there are a number of other factors leading to the high amount of sediment.
“It’s really a symptom of the problems upstream,” Shinderman said. “And it’s not just one problem.”
He said there are some places along the Deschutes River that have had the native vegetation removed or replaced by “turf grass.” The loss of that vegetation makes the banks unstable and causes erosion that deposits sediment in the river.
A much larger issue, however, is the management of the Wickiup Reservoir about 60 miles upstream, Shinderman said. Water released from the reservoir can have a dramatic impact on flows and discharge more sediment into the river depending on the season. According to the 2009 Mirror Pond study, water flows can vary by more than 1,500 cubic feet per second between summer and winter.
“The Mirror Pond group is not going to resolve those issues,” Shinderman said. “(But) what we would like to do is, through this process we would like to bring in all the various partners upstream. And as we’re doing this project, have them do projects upstream that will make this worthwhile.”
McLandress said he’s looking forward to undertaking such a complex project, and is especially excited about it since it’s one that will leave a lasting impression on the community where he now lives.
“Mirror Pond is such an iconic part of Bend that it begs to be fixed,” McLandress said. “This is the first time that we’re really coming to a great synergy in trying to solve the problem.”
One of the most important aspects of his job, he said, will be getting input from the public on what should be included in the scope of work for the alternatives analysis. Like Shinderman, he understands the complexities of the project and realizes a solution will likely involve stakeholders from throughout the region.
He also said he realized this won’t be easy, and with all the various stakeholders, might even involve some controversy.
“The trick is how as a community, based on our values and our changing social fabric, can we adapt to the change that’s happening in Mirror Pond and the change that has been occurring in Mirror Pond for generations,” McLandress said.
“Mother Nature has been altered, and she’s fighting back. We have to make a decision on how we want to adapt to the changes of the appearance of Mirror Pond and to what degree we want to pay for the fix to keep it as is or modify it so water flows faster through the pond and distributes the silt in a different way.”
Nick Grube can be reached at 541-633-2160 or at ngrube@bendbulletin.com.
