More than 20 volunteers were out Tuesday morning taking part in Creek Week, the annual restoration event held by the Fountain Creek Watershed District.

Volunteers worked around the edges of Pikeview Reservoir, untangling forgotten fishing lines from the rocks, carefully picking up bottles, and carrying away bag after bag of litter.

The reservoir is one of more than 80 sites in southeast Colorado in this year’s event, which began on Saturday and will continue through this weekend. Creek Week allows the public to play a role in the constant work required to maintain Fountain Creek’s role as one of the key waterways in Colorado.

Pikeview, in addition to being a popular fishing spot, juts off Monument Creek as part of the broader Fountain Creek system. Volunteers on Tuesday included 15 students from Fountain-Fort Carson High School’s Sustainability Club and a team from Colorado Parks and Wildlife, who stock the reservoir and help keep the area in shape.

“It gets people out in nature. It shows them all the natural beauty and trails that we have to preserve,” said Allision Schuch, executive director for the Fountain Creek Watershed District.

Fountain Creek Watershed District represents the local governments from El Paso and Pueblo counties as the primary source behind improvements and mitigation work along the creek.

Schuch came up with the Creek Week idea 12 years ago as a way to get more public involvement. The annual push now has dozens of cleanups taking place, ranging in size from a handful of volunteers to official events put on by the cities of Colorado Springs and Pueblo. This year, the district also is offering a “Hydration Celebration” partnership with local bars and breweries, where $1 from every sale of a special tie-in IPA will go toward the district’s work.

Brody Keilui, a teacher at Fountain-Fort Carson High School who runs the Sustainability Club, said the club has been running for several years, but this was their first major involvement in Creek Week. The cleanup events nearer to Fountain could not accommodate a large group of students, so he arranged for them to come to Colorado Springs for the morning.

“I know that it’s important for them to be plugged into where they live, to have somewhere that feels like home. If it gets them to care about the environment too, that’s awesome,” Keilui said.

The trash cleanups are only a portion of the work Watershed District does to keep the creek in good shape. Over the summer, the district completed around $11 million in large-scale restoration projects on Eagleridge Creek and along Southmoor Drive in Fountain, where they planted trees and stabilized the creek banks. Colorado Springs Utilities provided the Watershed District $50 million for its mitigation committee to spend on projects.

Schuch said the district had about $9 million remaining for projects, but that there was no dedicated, continuing revenue for the work. With budget crunches facing Colorado Springs and many other cities this year, the funding for Fountain Creek was expected to stay flat or drop slightly.

“We want to work together to solve these really big challenges before we have to deal with a fire or a new natural disaster,” Watershed District outreach coordinator Mary Wilson said.

Other work required

While the Watershed District was created to manage Fountain Creek, Colorado Springs is legally obligated to take on millions of dollars worth of projects on its own.

In 2016, the city was sued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Pueblo County and the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District. The lawsuit said the city had failed to fund storm-water efforts along Fountain Creek for years, which had caused the creek and its tributaries to start degrading and jeopardized the city’s ability to keep its federal permit for the sewer system output.

In October 2020, a consent decree was proposed to end the lawsuit. The final agreement held the city accountable for making millions of dollars worth of improvements mitigation projects along Fountain Creek every year. An intergovernmental agreement with Utilities and Pueblo County set the goal at $460 million in storm-water projects and education by the end of 2036.

The city has spent $148 million on capital storm-water projects over the past nine years. Stormwater Enterprise Fund Manager Erin Powers said the city had recently completed a restoration project along Cottonwood Creek to reduce the erosion happening in the area.

“When you have a channel that is eroding because the grade is too steep, we can add drop structures through the creek to help the water. It makes them slow and not carry as much sediment,” Powers said. Drop structures pass water to a lower elevation while controlling the energy and speed of the water as it passes over.

The consent decree also required Colorado Springs to pay $2.1 million in fines, mostly to the federal government and the Water Conservancy District, and provide better internal controls to monitor the city’s stormwater output. Powers said those changes included hiring dedicated erosion inspectors and creating a dedicated team to review compliance with stormwater permits.

The official Creek Week cleanup project being organized by Colorado Springs and the El Pomar Foundation will take place at 3 p.m. Friday at America the Beautiful Park.