Kids Creek reconstruction begins, closing Eleventh Street in Traverse City

Eleventh Street closed from Division Street to Elmwood Avenue as crews began the next phase of the Kids Creek reconstruction, a six-week project budgeted at just under $750,000. Drivers and nearby businesses will have to work around the shutdown while the crossing is rebuilt.

The work centers on an undersized, misaligned culvert at 11th Street that has to be replaced to restore proper stream dimensions and sediment transport. The project aims to return the creek to a more natural flow pattern and improve fish habitat. Kids Creek has long been pushed into flashier runoff, flooding, scoured stream bottoms and sediment problems by stormwater.

The Watershed Center says the Eleventh Street crossing is a key step toward removing Kids Creek from Michigan’s Impaired Waters List, where the creek remains because of a poor macroinvertebrate community tied largely to stormwater issues. The crossing sits between other recent road-crossing improvements. Funding for the phase comes through the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy’s Nonpoint Source Program, with federal support from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the City of Traverse City as a project partner. In March, the Watershed Center secured a $550,000 state grant, and the city supplied the local match and construction oversight.

The current phase is part of a larger Kids Creek Restoration Project that began in 2013. Kids Creek drains almost 7 square miles and is a major tributary to the Boardman River, carrying water toward Grand Traverse Bay. The Watershed Center says more than $9 million in grant funds have been secured for the work, while Traverse City says nearly $2.75 million had already been invested in earlier green infrastructure and crossing improvements.

Those earlier projects included 2021 replacement of three undersized culverts at Cedar Street and Sixth Street and two clear-span pedestrian bridges near the old railroad grade between Division Street and Silver Drive and on the abandoned Elmwood Avenue segment between 11th Street and Silver Lake Road. NOAA Fisheries funded the earlier work with more than $1.5 million through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, with close to 4,000 feet of creek expected to benefit.