A Soldotna property is the subject of an Environmental Protection Agency violation, after the owner did excavation work that agencies say disrupted salmon habitat and violated the Clean Water Act. Now, the owner and agencies are locked in a battle about how to restore it.
In 2021, an Anchorage-based developer named Mohammed Ali, as administrator of the Bengal Family Trust, bought a 30-acre undeveloped Soldotna property south of the Sterling Highway, near the Soldotna Animal Hospital. The parcel contained a small tributary of Soldotna Creek, a salmon-bearing stream that’s the namesake of the city.
Ali says the goal was to build a recreation spot on the peninsula for his family. But he drained a wetland to do that, and dug an unpermitted ditch that the EPA, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Alaska Department of Fish and Game and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say disrupted salmon-bearing waters and caused major habitat damage.
“The Kenai lowlands have a lot of these wetland channels that are really good rearing habitat for coho, especially. And there are these super narrow little streams that you don’t even know are there until you step into them, essentially,” said Kaitlynn Cafferty, area manager for Fish and Game’s Habitat Section. “And that’s what was lost when the landowner ditched this wetland.”
The Habitat Section has regulatory authority over anadromous streams — waterways that house fish that live in saltwater and spawn in freshwater, like salmon. They regulate waterways that belong to a catalog, which is updated constantly.
The Soldotna Creek tributary was categorized as anadromous, right up to the edge of Ali’s property. It primarily contains rearing coho salmon. And although it wasn’t documented before, Cafferty strongly suspects there were salmon on the wetland property.
“We trapped these little side tributaries and caught fish in those, which to me indicates that there were likely fish in here before the wetland was ditched” she said.
Cafferty said anyone doing development is obligated to reach out to her department to have their waterways assessed for salmon. And if they’re found, a permit would be required to do any work. But without that process, the long, straight ditch has become a salmon habitat — just not a valuable one. She said there’s a hydraulic jump in the ditch, a small waterfall-like feature that prevents movement for young salmon, and the shape is less than ideal for young fish.
Ali said he didn’t believe the property was a wetland at the time he began development, and was frustrated when agencies began telling him he’d committed violations.
“We’ve seen worse, but this is a really significant case and there was a good deal of damage done,” said Bill Dunbar, spokesperson for the EPA out of Seattle.
He said the scale of environmental destruction at the Soldotna property isn’t unheard of, but is inexcusable.
“It shouldn’t be a mystery to anybody that they need a permit to conduct any work near a stream. It’s pretty well known,” he said. “So when someone proceeds to do this kind of damage without a permit, you can’t plead ignorance of the law. We’d be hard pressed for anyone to make the case that doing this amount of damage to a salmon-bearing stream would be OK.”
Dunbar said once the EPA gets involved in a situation like this, the agency brings a case against the property owner and gets them to agree to restore the damaged area, which is called a consent agreement. There’s also a penalty involved, calculated by the severity of violations and willfulness of the damage.
“Those numbers can get very big very fast. There’s a counter to that penalty policy, which is as the amount may accrue based on the number of violations and severity of the violations, the property owner’s ability to pay becomes an issue, as well,” Dunbar said. “And in this case, that’s exactly what happened.”
Ali demonstrated to the EPA that he was unable to pay the full penalty, and was fined $3,000. Dunbar couldn’t share what the number would be if he could pay, but said it would be “a lot more.”
After signing a consent agreement with the EPA in October, Ali was obligated to hire a consulting firm to create a restoration plan.
The agencies say Ali fired the first consultant. The current one, 3-Tier Alaska of Anchorage, was hired in November and proposed a plan for restoration that included regrading the ditch to remove barriers and leaving the salmon in it.
Cafferty, with Fish and Game, and Dunbar, with EPA, said they’ve been dissatisfied with the consultant’s proposals so far. Cafferty said Ali’s ideas don’t meet the consent agreement’s goals for restoration, which include improving fish habitat, restoring the tributaries and raising the groundwater. She submitted her first proposal, to bring back water to the Soldotna Creek tributary that was drained in the excavation process.
Ali’s consultants responded, saying that plan wasn’t hydrologically realistic. Cafferty said the owner and the agencies will continue to go back and forth until they settle on a plan that satisfies the agreement.
“We’re basically looking at new restoration alternatives moving forward, because, to me, their original plan just isn’t a real, a real holistic restoration plan,” she said. “It only kind of addresses one problem.”
She said her new proposal is to use beaver-style dams to back up the water in the ditch, which would slowly raise the water table and make it look more like the original wetland stream.
Ali has his own frustrations. He wants agencies to make their maps and required permits more clear for developers, and doesn’t understand why he can’t leave the ditch as is, where he said vegetation has already regrown and salmon have made a habitat.
“I know that these agencies were created to benefit the public, and our watershed. But are they doing their job?” he said. “It seems like these agencies have just got so much power, they’re dictating things, and I don’t think they’re doing their job at this point.”
And he’s bothered that he had to hire a consultant if the agencies were just going to return their own plans for the restoration.
“We went ahead and hired an engineering firm, and they already had a design they think is going to work best for the project. But the agencies are not really listening to the engineering firm,” Ali said. “So my question is, why did they want me to hire an engineering firm if they’re not really listening to the engineering firm?”
Dunbar said the EPA’s goal is to have the property restored by this summer, although the pace so far hasn’t been as fast as any of the involved agencies would like. Ali said once the process is over, he still plans to make the property a camping spot for his family.
This story has been updated to correct Kaitlynn Cafferty's job title, and clarify some details of the salmon habitat.
