U.S. Rep. Huffman tours Eel River restoration project

The Russ Creek and Centerville Slough Restoration Project is a unique example of stakeholder collaboration and one of the state’s largest coastal restoration efforts.

August 10, 2026

U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) spent last Thursday evening touring the Russ Creek and Centerville Slough Restoration Project, a 1,540-acre project at the mouth of the Eel River Estuary northwest of Ferndale.

A Wildlands Conservancy project, undertaken in collaboration with the Humboldt County Resource Conservation District, Natural Resources Conservation Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, engineering consultants with GHD, construction firm Mercer-Fraser and landowner Jay Russ, among other stakeholders, the Russ Creek and Centerville Slough Restoration Project purports to be one of the largest coastal restoration efforts in California.

It’s also a unique project insofar as it is on privately owned land, and in addition to reestablishing 550 acres of continuous floodplain and tribal habitat, it will allow for the preservation and improvement of adjacent agricultural lands — working across multiple plots of private property to address systemic tidal connectivity and drainage challenges along a rapidly subsuming reclaimed agricultural landscape that was once important brackish marshland habitat.

“… We have a couple of endangered species on this property: western snowy plover that are actually doing quite well and recovering in this area. We also have endangered tidewater goby, GHD Engineer Conor Shea told those assembled. “But really, what this restores is a good part of the estuary where we would see a lot of marine species come in and rear, so we’ll see juvenile smelt and herring and crabs, and the coho and Chinook salmon in the Eel (River) will use this area during the springtime as they migrate out. Having this food resource in this area will allow them to put on a lot of weight, so that’ll help with their recovery. This just restores the kind of the lungs of the estuary, because most of the estuary was cut off. … Most of the tidal channels were cut off from the estuary, and now we, with this project and several other projects going on in the Eel Delta, we’re restoring those lungs, and it’s just so productive for biomass. It also will provide a lot of benefits for birds, shore birds and migratory birds.”

“There’ll be a lot of shallow areas for the fish to hang out instead of getting flushed out each time of the time. A lot of protected areas, a lot of transition zones from the full salt ocean to brackish, to fresh, really just restoring the landscape and all the processes involved with that,” GHD Engineer and Project Manager Patrick Sullivan said.

Sullivan also noted that flood control will be an important feature of the project.

“One of the challenges about this project and why we have such an extensive channel network is to protect the adjacent landowners,” Sullivan said. “So, we’re restoring all this to tidal, but at the same time, avoiding impacts to adjacent landowners. … So, part of the project is a setback levy, to protect this area from flooding, and also, this channel will prevent backwaters in the Salt River and the Eel that would cause flooding.”

Russ, a fifth-generation rancher, told those gathered that after returning to the area to work the family’s land as a rancher in the 1990s, he first began to see the effects of tectonic activity and sea-level rise impacting the pasture land in the Eel River watershed.

“At the time, I noticed that there was more and more over-wash in the dunes, and I didn’t put it together, but as time passed, that over-wash kind of worked its way down the dune strand, and the interior drainages weren’t functioning the way they were, … and then some surveys came about that we’ve acknowledged that we’ve subsided here, so the land was literally lower or relative to sea level,” Russ said. “… So from my perspective, … as you know, our livelihood is agricultural grazing, and just things weren’t functioning as they should. We weren’t draining. The salt water that was coming in over the dunes was being impounded.”

The project will involve significant revegetation efforts, Wildlands Conservancy TITLE Doreen Hansen told the Times-Standard, populating some 1,500 feet of channel with native riparian plants, while also working to eliminate the ubiquitous invasive cordgrass species, Spartina densiflora, that has spread throughout much of the Humboldt Bay area.

When completed, the Russ Creek and Centerville Slough Restoration Project will function with the adjacent Salt River Ecosystem Restoration Project and other restoration projects in the Eel River Valley to support anadromous fish and other species, encourage the health of fisheries and native habitat and support local agricultural producers.


By:  Robert Schaulis
Source: Times-Standard