Tribe, Pierce County to face off over river levee

Pierce County has a levee on the White River that the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe wants gone.

And the Muckleshoots have sued to make that happen, contending the county is trespassing on tribal land and the levee is hurting fish stocks.

The levee is near Greenwater on land the tribe bought in 2013, according to the lawsuit the Muckleshoot Federal Corp. filed July 14 in Pierce County Superior Court.

The suit asks that the county be required “to remove all of the material it has placed on the property and to restore the property to its natural condition.”

The area has about 800 feet of levee, Harold Smelt, a manager with county’s Surface Water Management Division, told The News Tribune.

It protects state Route 410 and the town of Greenwater by keeping the river channel from moving, he said.

“We don’t want it to erode into the highway,” Smelt said.

The tribe declined to comment about the lawsuit, but indicated in its suit that its problem with the levee has to do with salmon.

According to the suit:

The county asked the tribe for an easement to repair and maintain the levee in June 2016. The tribe wrote back later that year, asking for documentation that prior land owners had given permission for the levee to be built.

“In its letter the Tribe also expressed significant concerns with the adverse impacts of the levee on White River fish stocks and the habitat which those stocks depend upon for their survival,” the suit states.

The county responded that it could find no recorded property rights, easements or licenses for the levee, but believed it had previously been given permission to access the land.

“Pierce County had not, until recently, fully understood that we did not hold recorded property rights to maintain this facility, but believe that some level of prescriptive rights do exist from at least 30 years of occupation,” the county wrote.

The county built the section of levee in question from sand, gravel and rocks sometime after July 16, 2007, as an extension of nearby levees the county built as early as 1982, according to the suit.

In 2013, the Muckleshoot corporation bought the land with the extended levee from the Delaware-based company White River Forests, which had purchased the property from the Weyerhaeuser Co. in 2002, according to property records.

Smelt said he wasn’t sure when the levee was built, but the information he did have seemed to differ from that in the lawsuit.

He said plans dated 1933 suggest the state Department of Transportation built the levee. He couldn’t say when the county took charge of the levee, but knows the county was actively maintaining it in the 1980s.

Asked whether the suit was referring to a piece of the levee while Smelt was talking about the entire thing — and whether that could explain the time line discrepancy — county spokeswoman Libby Catalinich said that would be determined during the legal process.

Asked whether the county takes measures to protect salmon from its levees, Smelt said:

“Whenever we do maintenance, we make sure that any environmental impacts of that maintenance work are properly mitigated. Usually it means including some large woody debris, some trees to add diversity and create some potential habitat for salmon species.”

Given the pending litigation, Catalinich said, the county “couldn’t speculate” about whether that was done at the Greenwater levee.

This story was originally published July 21, 2017 at 3:15 PM with the headline "Tribe, Pierce County to face off over river levee."