I was still pretty early in my consulting career, and the client... a California state agency... had already developed a mitigation concept. The previous consultant had botched a few things, and one day I got one of those "help" calls from one of our west coast offices. I spent about the next year completing permitting for the project, and making some minor adjustments to the design.
It was one of those things that had to be an improvement, because pre-project it was nothing but a straight-sided ditch with weedy banks. We ultimately restored a gently meandering tidal channel with bordering seasonal wetland and a short interpretive trail. Because it was the first restoration project that I'd worked on and actually seen built, I visited several times over the years to see how it was doing.
Through the five year monitoring program, things went well. The agencies signed off on a "success" and then... nothing. There was, as far as I can tell, no maintenance after that. I'm not even sure if anyone except me has looked at the site since then.
The tidal channel still looks pretty good, as of last summer. The brackish water does a pretty good job of keeping weeds out, so there's a nice bulrush-dominated community lining the channel.
The problem is that the project site borders a busy highway. Predictably, the area between the road and the channel has become pretty weedy. What's perhaps even more disappointing is that the interpretive signs are faded and unreadable, and weeds grow through cracks in the trail.
On the interior half of the site, across the tidal channel from the road, things are much better. I don't have access to the site and have chosen not to climb the fence, but as far as I can tell the seasonal wetland there is working as it was intended to. It's not pristine, but it's not unusually weedy either. That part of the site is contiguous with adjacent public open space, and it's functioning pretty nicely.
Overall, the disappointment is minor. There are a few lessons learned; one is that because no parking was provided for the interpretive trail, no one other than the kids from the adjacent subdivision ever seems to go out there. The local municipality has posted no parking signs along the road (they went in years after project completion), so it's just barely possible to squeeze one small car off the roadside by the trailhead.
I guess the project counts as 75% successful. There was never any stated intent to maintain a pristine native upland community, but the presence of invasives along the roadside is troublesome. The biggest lesson, for me, is that project sponsors can't always be counted on to maintain a mitigation site after the monitoring period, especially when all of the people involved have retired or moved to other jobs.
It's been about 18 years since the permits were issued and the project was built. I intend to revisit the site from time to time, every few years, to watch the trajectory. Never stop learning.
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