By TERRYL ASLA
tasla@soundpublishing.com

KINGSTON — If you take the Kingston ferry, live in Kingston, or take the Hood Canal Bridge to work, you need to plan ahead for delays and detours late this summer and on into the fall.

To improve fish passage in Dogfish, Gamble and Grovers creeks, the state Department of Transportation, or WSDOT, will replace three culverts under state routes 104 and 307.

In addition, WSDOT will repave SR 104 from east of Balmoral Place NE down to the Kingston ferry landing (see map). This project will begin in mid- to late-summer and is expected to continue into late October. It will involve repaving the street and upgrading the ADA ramps on street corners. The street work will be done at night to minimize inconvenience.

The culvert replacements will require road closures and detours (see maps). Work on these is expected to being mid-July with in-stream construction taking place between Aug. 1 and Sept. 30.

The work will close SR 104 at milepost 22 for a week, and SR 307 at mileposts 4.6 and .5 for up to two weeks. However, the road closures on SR 104 and SR 307 will not take place at the same time.

According to WSDOT Communications Manager Claudia Bingham Baker, road crews have to tear out the entire roadway in order to remove the culverts and restore the stream to its natural width. The smaller culverts will be replaced by box culverts.

Bingham Baker said the timing of the construction is determined by the “fish window,” the time of year when the fish population is lowest.

WSDOT is under a U.S. District Court injunction to remove some 800 culverts that are barriers to fish passage, according to Bingham Baker. According to its website, WSDOT will be correcting some 30 to 40 culverts per year from now through 2020.

The injunction is the result of a lawsuit brought by 21 Northwest Washington Tribes that asked the U.S. District Court to find that the Washington State has a treaty-based duty to preserve fish runs, according to the WSDOT website.

In 2013, the court ruled in favor of the Tribes and declared that the right of taking fish, secured to the Tribes in the Stevens Treaties, imposes a duty upon the state to refrain from building or operating culverts under state-maintained roads that hinder fish passage and thereby reduce the number of fish that would otherwise be available for Tribal harvest.