The Indiana Department of Environmental Management has approved a management plan for the Salt Creek watershed aimed at improving the creek’s water quality.

The Salt Creek Watershed Group will hold its last planning meeting this Thursday at 9:30 a.m. at the Forest Park Golf Course in Valparaiso to tour the first implementation projects contained in the plan. The meeting is open to the public.

The Salt Creek Watershed Group has been working for two years to develop the plan, which has been coordinated by the Save the Dunes Council using funding from IDEM. The 49,573 acre Salt Creek watershed includes sections of Valparaiso, Portage, Chesterton, Porter, Burns Harbor, South Haven, Shorewood Forest, and unincorporated Porter County.

With the plan now approved, IDEM has approved a $221,816 grant for the Save the Dunes Council to continue coordinating the group’s efforts in the watershed. Thursday’s meeting makes the transition from the planning process into the implementation phase of watershed management.

The watershed group installed two rain gardens at the Forest Park, the site of Thursday’s meeting. A rain garden is a shallow, vegetated depression that helps clean and manage stormwater runoff on site. The bowl-shaped gardens collect runoff and allow it to infiltrate into the ground.

Several other demonstration projects were installed while developing the Salt Creek Watershed Management Plan. Save the Dunes partnered with the following groups: Portage Parks Department to install a vegetated roof at Imagination Glen Park, Valparaiso University to install a vegetated swale on campus, the city of Valparaiso to install forested buffers and rain gardens at Forest Park, and the Porter County Solid Waste District and Porter County Community Foundation to kick off the Porter County Rain Barrel Program for residents.

“It is fitting to hold our last watershed planning meeting at a project site to showcase the group’s accomplishments,” said Save the Dunes Water Program Director and project coordinator, Christine Livingston. “The Forest Park projects are just the beginning of the Salt Creek Watershed Group1s efforts to protect and improve the watershed.”

Volunteers are needed to help carry out projects in the plan, such as planting rain gardens, monitoring water quality, and installing best management practices, such as rain barrels, on their own properties.

For more information phone 879-3564.

Posted 6/23/2008