The grant for the Iliuliuk River requires revegetation and stairway installation along areas like this. (Annie Ropeik/KUCB)

City council and neighbors from around Unalaska Lake got a reality check Tuesday night about just how far they can stretch $1 million in grant money for watershed restoration projects.

Consultants from PND Engineers spent much of Tuesday's council meeting presenting their recommendations for how to use the grants at the lake and Iliuliuk River.

Engineer Paul Kendall says some of the river grant was based on conditions that seem to have changed in the past several years, since the city first received the money. Requirements like light-penetrating stairs on the riverbank and revegetation at the lower river didn’t get much public support.

And combined with a fish weir -- which residents did favor -- they cost more than the quarter of a million dollars on offer for the river.

But Kendall says the state isn’t giving them much flexibility to move those funds around. 

"Basically [they] said not only can you not do that, you have to build everything we told you to build," he said. "You can’t just build a portion of it."

So they’ve asked the state for extra funds instead, left over from similar grants that went unused. But Kendall says that money probably won’t come through anytime soon.

That leaves the city of Unalaska with a short list of options if they want to use the grant money before their June 2016 deadline.

On Tuesday, city council asked their staff to find out whether some of the projects could be done in-house to save money. They also wanted information from the Department of Fish & Game on the cost of counting salmon long-term once a weir is installed.  

State biologist Matthew Keyse said Wednesday that he doesn't believe Fish & Game will be providing personnel to run the weir, since the Iliuliuk salmon runs are estimated to be relatively small. He wasn't sure how much it would cost another group to do the job, either.

But he says ADF&G will help out to make sure the data collected is up to their official standards.

Council will vote on a final plan for the watershed grant projects at their next meeting.

Also last night, councilors passed a resolution opposing the nomination of the Aleutian Islands as a national marine sanctuary.

It's mostly a ceremonial gesture: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said last Friday that the nomination won't advance. But Mayor Shirley Marquardt is still worried about NOAA’s promise to keep working with the plan's authors on future proposals.

"We wanted to go ahead and leave this on the agenda ... and pass it for the record, because we honestly don’t think we’re done with this yet," she said.

Unalaska joins other communities along the chain in opposing the nomination, saying it would create too many restrictions for the region’s fisheries.

Council’s next meeting is Feb. 10. It’ll be one of the last meetings for city manager Chris Hladick, who has to move to Juneau by mid-March for his new job as state commerce commissioner.

This story has been updated.