Lifetime Citizen Portal Access — AI Briefings, Alerts & Unlimited Follows
Tri-City partners and tribes outline plan to seek federal transfer of Columbia River shoreline
Loading...
Summary
City staff updated council on a regional effort—backed by Richland, Kennewick, Pasco, counties, the Port of Pasco and tribal partners—to seek Congressional legislation transferring Corps-owned shoreline to local governments with recorded tribal protections and streamlined state-level environmental review.
City staff on Tuesday briefed the Richland City Council on a multi-jurisdictional effort to transfer Corps-owned Columbia River shoreline to local governments without requiring completion of the full federal environmental review process first.
The proposal, developed by a Tri-Cities shoreline reconveyance working group and tribal partners, would ask Congress to transfer identified shoreline parcels at no cost to local governments and substitute the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) for the federal NEPA process after land transfer, while preserving cultural-resource protections and treaty-reserved rights.
Why it matters: Local governments collectively spend about $2 million a year maintaining parks and shoreline land that remains under Corps ownership. Staff told the council that completing NEPA for thousands of acres would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming; a targeted legislative transfer would aim to streamline operations while preserving environmental and cultural safeguards.
What staff described: David (staff), who reviewed the project history, said the effort grew from decades of complicated federal management and stalled transfers. The working group proposes a four-part framework: (1) enabling legislation, (2) a memorandum of agreement among local governments and tribes, (3) a recorded cultural-practices easement protecting treaty activities, and (4) ground-disturbance protocols overseen by a committee modeled on the Intertribal Advisory Board.
Council concerns and clarifications: Council members asked which parcels Richland should include; staff identified two Richland parcels (R1, a corridor to Columbia Point South, and R2 near the Reach Museum) and said more developed parks could be added to the list if the council wished. Staff emphasized the Corps would likely retain levee and flood-control infrastructure and that the city is not seeking land below the ordinary high water mark. To preserve park status, staff suggested using restrictive covenants that run with the land.
Tribal protections: Staff said the MOA would establish limited government-to-government relationships with the Yakama Nation and amendments to the CTUIR agreement; the recorded cultural-practices easement would generally cover about 200 feet from ordinary high water to protect traditional fishing, hunting and gathering activities and require inadvertent-discovery protocols for human remains and artifacts.
Next steps: Staff expects to present a polished MOA and a map of proposed parcels to council at a February meeting, potentially accompanied by a resolution identifying the properties to include in the legislative request. The working group continues to negotiate details with tribal staff and congressional offices.
What remains unresolved: Staff stressed the complexity of locating historical Corps flowage easements (some recorded only in the 1940s federal register), and recommended that the Corps relinquish unnecessary flowage easements landward of the levee system — a time-consuming task. The council did not take formal action at the workshop.
