The Yakima Basin Fish and Wildlife Recovery Board (Recovery Board) is pleased to announce that the state’s Salmon Recovery Funding Board (SRFB) has approved $3,220,375 in projects submitted by the Recovery Board for fish habitat protection and restoration in the Yakima Basin. These 10 projects are a big step forward in our ongoing work to ensure salmon, steelhead, and bull trout all can thrive in the Yakima Basin!
The SRFB has awarded grants for salmon recovery every year since 1999. This year, there were two additional funding programs, one focused on restoration of riparian areas (the land adjacent to rivers), and another for monitoring projects, which help us better understand what we need to do to recover salmon and steelhead.
“This is the second year of the riparian grant round, and it has allowed us to fund many more riparian projects than we could have funded in a normal grant round, supporting this crucial work,” said Alex Conley, Recovery Board Executive Director. “The new monitoring grant program is an exciting step towards dedicated funding for species/habitat monitoring, which is critical for informing our recovery strategies.”
The local grant review process is coordinated by the Recovery Board, which serves as the “Lead Entity” for the Yakima Basin. Lead Entities are community-based salmon recovery organizations working across the state of Washington to protect and restore fish species listed as threatened or endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA).
While each of the 26 Lead Entities in the state operate somewhat differently, they all partner with community leaders and technical experts to review project proposals. These volunteers serve on committees and offer their combined local knowledge to evaluate projects based on both scientific merit and socio-economic considerations.
In the Yakima Basin, our technical review committee brings local experts together to evaluate and prioritize projects based on how well they implement the Recovery Board’s regional recovery plans for steelhead and bull trout, species which are listed as threatened under the ESA. Our citizen committee is set up to have equal representation from all three of the Basin’s counties (Benton, Kittitas, and Yakima) and the Yakama Nation.
“Our volunteer committees are really how we put our belief that salmon recovery should be a bottom-up, community-led process into practice,” said Cheyne Mayer, Recovery Board Lead Entity Coordinator. “From the start, the state has empowered them to make the funding recommendations, and the process is just really honoring of local knowledge and priorities. It’s a great model for how any number of governmental grant programs could be run.”
This year, $2.1M was awarded to 6 projects in Kittitas County and $790k was awarded to 3 projects in Yakima County. $300k was awarded to a monitoring project which will take place across Benton, Kittitas, and Yakima counties. Projects will restore in-stream and streambank habitat (5 projects), develop designs for future projects (4 projects), and collect data on fish habitat usage and migration (1 project).
To learn more, the full project list can be found on the Recovery Board website at https://ybfwrb.org/2025-srfb-grant-round/, including links to in-depth project descriptions on the state’s PRISM database. To reach project contacts, please contact Cheyne Mayer, Recovery Board Lead Entity Coordinator, at [email protected] or (509) 654-7056.