FishPass enters final construction phase, adds public riverfront features

The FishPass project is moving from river engineering to the part residents will actually see and use: paths, an amphitheater and a science building along the Boardman-Ottaway River in downtown Traverse City. After years of planning, the work now centers on upland features that will turn the site into a public riverfront space as the major in-stream construction wraps up.

That final phase matters because FishPass is meant to do more than rebuild one piece of infrastructure. The City of Traverse City says the project will replace the aging Union Street Dam, reconnect the river with Lake Michigan and use a new barrier system to block invasive species such as sea lamprey while selectively passing desirable fish. In practice, officials are asking residents to judge the project on two fronts at once: whether it performs as an ecological filter on the river and whether it creates a place people actually want to walk, fish, bike and gather in.

The Great Lakes Fishery Commission has described FishPass as the capstone of roughly two decades of restoration work on the Boardman, also called the Ottaway, River. Planning documents have pointed to a research and education building and interpretive signage explaining the Boardman River, sea lamprey, the Union Street Dam and the technology being demonstrated. The final construction phase now adds the most visible public pieces to that vision, including paths, an amphitheater and a science building.

Construction officially began with site fencing on May 21, 2024, and city monitoring of the Union Street Dam stopped that same month because of the project. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded the fish passage facility contract to Spence Brothers Construction of Traverse City in October 2020 for $19.3 million, and a later city update said wet-work costs had risen to $23.2 million. City officials said they had secured $5.2 million in contingency funding and still expected all project elements to be completed in 2027.

The Corps has said the project is primarily funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, with additional partners including the U.S. Geological Survey, the Environmental Protection Agency and Fisheries and Oceans Canada. For Grand Traverse County, the end result will be judged not by the scale of the construction itself, but by whether the Boardman-Ottaway corridor becomes easier to reach, more usable and more ecologically resilient once the work is done.