Wetlands take wing

Monday, Sept. 27, 1999 | 10:56 a.m.

The first marshes anchoring a $13 million wetlands park in the middle of Clark County's urban desert could be planted within a year.

A new law that goes into effect Friday allows nonprofit agencies to help local governments build wetlands, drawing the interest of the hunting group Ducks Unlimited.

The group, which devotes much of its energy to preserving and rehabilitating wetlands along duck migration routes, plans to design and build more than 200 acres of wetlands to help the county create a desert wetlands park.

The Clark County Commission gave parks and recreation staff permission in August 1998 to continue work on a comprehensive park plan for the wetlands park east of Boulder Highway. The park would provide a habitat for wildlife, and offer natural trails for Las Vegas Valley residents and an education center for researchers and schoolchildren.

The county is in the process of applying for dozens of environmental permits to create and restore the desert wetlands, using a master plan that will include trails and erosion control. It is using funding from a state bond approved in 1989.

Of the 2,400 acres -- an area four times the size of Central Park in New York City -- 800 acres of the proposed park will support ponds, marshes and cattails. The county expects about 174 species of birds in addition to beavers, coyotes, bobcats and rabbits to nest and rest in the park.

Ducks Unlimited will jump start the wetlands park with its project. The 210 acres it develops with ponds, floating island and marsh will be the first segment. The group does not have an estimate of what it will spend.

The County Commission welcomed the Ducks Unlimited offer to build local wetlands a year ago, approving in concept an agreement the group offered. The law needed to be changed to allow the help, and the agreement is now in the District Attorney's office for review.

Once the agreement is made final, Ducks Unlimited will begin planting 110 acres of wetlands, followed by another 100 acres about a year later, Jeff Harris, the county's park planning manager, said.

The first phase of the project could take four to six months. The two phases of the Ducks Unlimited project could take up to two years to complete.

In the meantime the group's experts have been surveying in the past year the 200 acres of remaining wetlands on the eastern edge of the Las Vegas Valley leading to Lake Mead. Before 1984 Las Vegas had more than 2,000 acres of wetlands.

What's left is still eroding, they've found. Ducks Unlimited officials noted floods in July and August cut 300-foot-wide swaths through parts of the remaining wetlands.

A flood on July 8 was so damaging that a temporary erosion control structure was swept away.

The changes after the floods showed it was "pretty badly eroded," the group's conservation program director, John Nagel, said in a phone call from his Sacramento office.

The damage could raise the price tag of the initial project.

The nationwide group is paying for the work out of its Wetlands America Trust created several years ago to raise $600 million for conservation, especially saving wetlands, Ducks Unlimited member Peter Kingman of Henderson said.

"I call it the green side of Ducks Unlimited," Kingman said of the trust, which has raised about $550 million so far.

Restoring wetlands is nothing new for the international organization born on the winds of the 1930s Dust Bowl.

Duck Unlimited emerged after the drought and wind devastated uncounted acres of wetlands in the U.S. prairies. A small group of conservationists and duck hunters followed the fowl and discovered that most of North America's waterfowl bred in the Canadian prairies. Its mission to restore wetlands for those water birds was born.

Ducks Unlimited has since expanded its goals to preserve rare marshes in places such as Sacramento, Northern Nevada's Lahontan Valley Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge -- and in the desert of Southern Nevada, Nagel said.

Las Vegas' desert wetlands park is unique, Harris said. The Las Vegas Wash runs almost 15 miles along the eastern edge of this desert valley, an urban wetlands close to Las Vegas neighborhoods and Strip resorts, only six miles away.

The proposed park is important not only for the migrating birds who would take refuge there.

A healthy wetlands also would help clean the treated sewage and untreated surface runoff entering Lake Mead six miles upstream from the valley's drinking water intake pipe.

With more than a million people living in the valley and more than 30 million tourists visiting each year, water from paved streets and parking lots pours untreated into the Las Vegas Wash and then into Lake Mead, the valley's drinking water supply.

Water-loving plants native to the Las Vegas marshes help filter the runoff loaded with bacteria, toxins and pesticides before it reaches Lake Mead.