This year’s work on the Silk Mill Run creek restoration will consist mainly of survey, design and permitting work, Jim Thorpe Borough officials said Thursday.

The project includes the demolition and removal of at least five dams along the nearly two-mile creek, a Class A brown trout cold-water fishery that runs on the outskirts of the borough and feeds into the Lehigh River.

“Surveys and testing are set to begin in April, though that is weather dependent,” Brooke Klotz, Jim Thorpe Borough secretary, told council during last week’s workshop meeting. “When the survey and analysis are completed, design plans will be drafted and submitted. Design and plan completion is anticipated by October.”

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection announced last year that it awarded the Borough of Jim Thorpe a $200,000 Growing Greener Grant for design work. It also received $65,000 from DCNR’s Community Conservation Partnerships Program.

Jim Thorpe is partnering with Wildlands Conservancy, a nonprofit that works to preserve thousands of acres of land and waterways in the Poconos, on the restoration project.

Wildlands, Klotz said, has contracted with Thompson Environmental for engineering work.

“Wildlands is going to be applying in the spring of 2024 for funding for construction,” Klotz said. “If funded, construction will begin in the summer of 2025.”

In addition to the dam removal, the project scope also includes stream bank restoration and improving wildlife habitat by restoring wetlands nearby.

The dams, Wildlands officials said, present a significant danger to aquatic life as they prevent fish passage to approximately half of the stream, obstructing native trout from swimming upstream in headwater habitat where water temperatures would be cooler in the warm summer months.

They also trap hundreds of tons of nutrients and sediment in the creek that could be released in the water should the dams breach.

The project has not gone without controversy at the local level. In December, Jim Thorpe Councilwoman Jessica Crowley with the Pa. Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the state attorney general’s office came out against Wildlands Conservancy, alleging a grant the municipality received for design work was fraudulent.

“The grant application states that Wildlands Conservancy, The William Penn Foundation, and Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Science has been collecting water samples from our Germantown reservoir and Silk Mill Creek and testing it for years,” Crowley posted on social media. “We all know this is not true, or at least it isn’t being done on public record.”