Restoration Planning

Portland Harbor Restoration

Restoring natural resources is the Trustee Council's ultimate goal. Natural resources include not only fish, wildlife, and habitat, but also the services those resources provide including public recreation and cultural values. Years of scientific studies assessing injury to natural resources, legal settlements, and if necessary, litigation are all steps to achieving that goal and compensating the public for natural resource losses caused by contamination. 

Restoration planning is the process that natural resource trustees use to determine the type and amount of restoration necessary to restore injured resources and people's use of those resources.

In 2012, the Trustee Council released its Programmatic Restoration Plan for public comment. The plan articulates the broad goal of improving habitat conditions along the lower Willamette River and focuses on the most important habitat needs of inured fish and wildlife. The Trustee Council selected Integrated Habitat Restoration as the preferred alternative for improving habitat conditions. This plan also describes how specific restoration projects consistent with Integrated Habitat Restoration would be chosen in the future.

The Trustee Council took another major step in 2020 when it released a Supplemental Restoration Plan focused on ecological restoration for public comment. This document picked up where the 2012 Programmatic Restoration Plan left off by selecting the purchase of restoration bank credits as its preferred alternative and identifying specific projects that could provide effective ecological restoration for a series of anticipated early legal settlements.

Meanwhile, the Trustee Council continues its restoration  planning work for future phases beyond the planned early settlements. The Trustee Council also continues to plan for restoration that will address recreational and tribal losses. Recreational and tribal losses will be addressed in future restoration plans.