Courtesy: City of Unalaska

Residents can hear the latest plans for cleaning up the Unalaska Lake watershed and weigh in again at a public meeting tonight.

Engineers and city officials heard hours of public comment at the city’s first forum on the project back in October. Since then, senior engineer Paul Kendall says they’ve taken a closer look at how to improve salmon spawning grounds in Unalaska Lake and the Iliuliuk River.

And they’ve been factoring residents’ ideas and their million-dollar budget constraint. Tonight, Kendall says they’ll present some specifics they want to pursue.

"It’s a chance to the public to say if we heard their comments correctly or not, did we get the gist of it and have we done a good job," he says.

At the last meeting, residents showed strong support for a weir to count salmon in the river. Kendall says they’ve put that at the top of their list. But the grant they’re working with requires some things locals were less enthusiastic about -- like stairs along the riverbanks, and a focus on revegetation.

Residents also suggested that silt pollution in the lake is coming from gravel runoff on Overland Drive. Since then, Kendall says the engineers have seen the problem firsthand.

"For a potential solution to help address that, there’s actually a few things up there," he says. "It could be anything from resurfacing of Overland … [to] also diverting water so it isn’t coming down along the road."

In the end, Unalaska’s city council will need to vote on three or four options to help clean up the watershed -- anything from a physical installation to a new management plan. But Kendall says ideas that get left on the table will still be useful for the city to keep in mind moving forward.

"The city, I don’t think, will be able to afford to implement everything. It’s not to say in the future, they couldn’t be," he says. "The plans are a really great starting point for documenting that knowledge from the local residents, and for initial thoughts on what the community would like to do to address it."

There are some things residents won’t be able to control -- like how funds are doled out for the projects. The lake is getting about two-thirds of the grant, and the river’s getting the rest. And it all has to be spent by 2016. That also means the city will have to work with local subsistence groups and permitting agencies to fund things like a fish weir into the future.

After tonight, Kendall hopes to have a draft of the clean-up options done in the next few weeks. City council will vote on a plan in January. Tonight’s forum is at 6 p.m. in the high school auditorium.