SOUTH JORDAN — A group of volunteers trying to coax part of the river bottom's ecosystem back to its natural state has been working on Mother Nature's deliberate timetable.
But in the space of a weekend, a chunk of that work has been undone.
For the last seven years, volunteers from TreeUtah and the Great Salt Lake Audubon Society have been restoring the natural habitat of an approximately 120-acre piece of land along the east banks of the Jordan River at about 11000 South. The golden currant trees they've planted there to provide berries and draw insects for migratory birds and shelter for less-hardy native trees have just begun to really take hold and start to thrive.
"The huge amount of work and community members who have come out to support this is phenomenal," TreeUtah outreach coordinator Tiffin Brough said Tuesday afternoon as she worked with a group of AmeriCorps volunteers planting willows on the site.
But Saturday afternoon, as volunteers showed up to prepare for an Earth Day community planting event, they discovered someone had bulldozed a 25-foot clearing right through the middle of those currants. That "someone" was a work crew preparing to bury a culinary water line for the city government. "We made a mistake," city attorney John Geilmann said. Geilmann said the mistake was a case of miscommunication.
The restoration project is a collaboration of several groups. Great Salt Lake Audubon heads up the project while TreeUtah organizes volunteers and handles the nitty-gritty of getting the work done. The project is taking place on land between 9800 South and 11100 South that is owned largely by the Utah Reclamation Mitigation and Conservation Committee , which owns a conservation easement through the sections it doesn't own.
Geilmann said the city got the go-ahead to start work, but that go-ahead didn't come from the right place. He said the OK came from URMCC, but he found out later that the actual on-site work was being done by TreeUtah.
"We thought that we had met the requirements of the easement, that we would coordinate any work that would go through that area. Come to find out, they were the wrong group," Geilmann said. "We talked to the wrong people, plain and simple. We admit that."
But Vaughn Lovejoy, an ecological-restoration coordinator for TreeUtah who has been working with Great Salt Lake Audubon and the URMCC, said he isn't aware of the city being in touch with anyone involved in the project.
"We have been having a problem communicating with South Jordan City as we've been trying to work on this project," Lovejoy said. "This is just heart-breaking to see that they would drive a bulldozer through the heart of the whole restoration project."
He said Audubon representatives have been calling city officials "for a number of months" trying to sit down and talk about plans to allow Willow Creek, a natural Jordan River tributary, to run through the entire property as a water source for the restored riparian habitat. He said the city has never called anyone back.
"We're just kind of flabbergasted when they say they talked to us. That's far from our experience," Lovejoy said. "It looks like they either broke the law or did not follow the spirit of the agreement."
That agreement, part of the conservation easement with URMCC, specified that if the city was to begin work in the area, the project partners would be contacted first and a specific plan would be worked out.
Lovejoy is frustrated because about 150 feet to the north of the area that was bulldozed, TreeUtah had left an unplanted swath specifically because it anticipated the city would need to bury a pipeline. But instead, the city plowed through a section of the restoration that had been the most successful, Lovejoy said.
"As it is now, they've damaged the prime area. It's going to take a tremendous amount of work and thinking carefully together how to restore this," he said.
That is why he is worried about the city's promises to make good for its mistake. He said the city can't expect to run to a local nursery and buy some seedlings to fill the gap its bulldozer left.
"Everything that was planted there, not only is it a native species, but we have been working with the state conservation nursery and getting seed from this area to get the same genotype for the Jordan River," Lovejoy said. "Those are not things you can just go out and purchase from a nursery. Those are things that take years to grow."
He's not sure what the next step needs to be. The recovery will be difficult because the pipeline work will leave the soil firmly compacted and less amenable to plant growth, Brough said. But they do know one thing they need to do next — make sure they are involved in the city's plans.
"We feel like we really need to sit down with South Jordan City and iron this out. We've been disappointed," Lovejoy said.
For its part, the city plans to clean up its mess, Geilmann said.
"We're going to do what we need to do to create a really good restoration plan," he said.
E-mail: dsmeath@desnews.com