Historically, Finn Creek flowed through Hansville, WA in a complex mosaic of wetlands and tidally-influenced salt marsh providing a critical nursery for baby salmon and other fishes, and important habitat for migratory waterfowl. When Kitsap County was awarded a state grant in 2004 to purchase the Norwegian Point County Park property, the County promised to restore the stream and wetlands on the property in order to enhance their habitat value. Now, a diverse partnership of habitat restoration professionals is working with Kitsap County to fulfill that commitment and make Norwegian Point County Park a more accessible and usable amenity to the greater Hansville community.

The goal of the Finn Creek Restoration Project is to improve habitat for fish and wildlife, while making the park more useable and enjoyable for the public. Click on the arrows and move the bar across the image to visualize the updated project designs.

In its present-day configuration, Norwegian Pt. County Park is effectively a parking area for beach access in an otherwise vacant lot that floods during the winter. A 300-foot-long concrete culvert carries Finn Creek under the parking area and dumps it unceremoniously onto the beach, blocking salmon from accessing two miles of fish habitat upstream; sections of the culvert are now are now failing and breaking apart. Upstream from the culvert, the stream is ditched and straightened along Hansville Rd. for another 900 feet, passing through two more partial barrier culverts.

Soon after the park was purchased, the Finland Creek Watershed Team, a committed group of local conservationists, collected baseline data and developed Finn Creek habitat restoration concepts for the County to consider. Building on that effort between 2017 and 2019, Wild Fish Conservancy worked with Kitsap County and a team of consultants to characterize existing conditions and more formally evaluate habitat restoration alternatives at the park. Importantly, the team modeled existing and predicted flooding at the site to ensure restoration actions wouldn’t exacerbate flood impacts for the park’s neighbors or the town of Hansville. The effort resulted in a Preliminary Design Report describing the analyses undertaken, the alternatives considered, and a recommended alternative for moving forward with a project to meet the project objectives: to restore the natural processes in lower Finn Creek that create and sustain habitats used by wild fish populations, while reducing extreme weather flood impacts to the Hansville community at several public meetings and incorporated community input into the project designs.

In 2022-2024, with support from the state’s Puget Sound Acquisition and Restoration Fund, the project team finalized the Finn Creek Estuary Restoration engineering and designs. Kitsap County is currently designing a new culvert to replace the partial barrier culvert under the Hansville Rd. and Buck Lake Rd. intersection, at the upstream end of the project.

The project team is also currently applying for state and federal grant funding to support the construction of this important nearshore habitat restoration and flood reduction project. In the meantime, we encourage those interested in the project to review the designs and design reports, to contact Wild Fish Conservancy with questions, and to stay tuned to this website for project updates.