History of the Johnson Creek Watershed Council

In the mid-1980s, a small grassroots group called the Friends of Johnson Creek (also known as the Johnson Creek Marching Band) began leading tours of Johnson Creek, highlighting it as a community asset. It was the first time that any group had portrayed Johnson Creek in a positive light publicly. For years, Johnson Creek had been known primarily as a degraded eyesore that frequently flooded. Several government agencies had tried unsuccessfully to solve the flooding problems, prescribing top-down engineering solutions, which were met with resistance, if not outright hostility from local residents, who felt that government was forcing a costly solution on them without their input.

In 1990, the City of Portland began convening multiple agencies and citizen stakeholders to develop a Johnson Creek Resource Management Plan (RMP). The Johnson Creek Corridor Committee (JCCC), as the coalition was called, met monthly for almost five years before publishing the RMP in 1995. Unlike previous failed planning efforts, the JCCC insisted that both government agencies and citizens groups begin working on early enhancement projects and public education programs, even before planning was finished. These early projects were critical in overcoming more than forty years of inertia and began building a culture of creek stewardship that today is one of the core strengths of the Johnson Creek Watershed Council. They also were an important tool to identify and engage the many and diverse types of community interests in Johnson Creek. Previous planning efforts had made the mistake of treating Johnson Creek stakeholders as uniform, with flooding as their sole concern.

One of the key recommendations made during Resource Management Planning was that a permanent group be formed to provide continued leadership, fostering the nascent stewardship ethic in the watershed. The Johnson Creek Watershed Council (JCWC) is this permanent group that grew out of the Johnson Creek Corridor Committee. Its first meeting as the Johnson Creek Watershed Council was in 1995.

The timing of JCWC’s formation was fortuitous as it coincided with the statewide establishment of watershed councils and the development of the Oregon Plan for salmon and watersheds. One of the key features of the Oregon Plan is its focus on voluntary restoration actions rather than regulatory mechanisms to achieve endangered species recovery and watershed health. It is predicated on a spirit of volunteerism and stewardship and the belief that it takes local knowledge of problems and a local sense of ownership to achieve long-term watershed health. Another key tenet of the Oregon Plan is that healthy watersheds support the economy and quality of life of Oregon.