Recreation and Conservation Office tours East Grays Harbor grant applicants
Published 1:30 am Friday, June 19, 2026
On Tuesday, staff with the Recreation and Conservation Office (RCO), Office of Financial Management, House and Senate Appropriations Committees and Governor’s Office toured four sites in East Grays Harbor County that were the focus of grant applications submitted to RCO.
For the first stop, the group visited the city of Elma’s Gladys Smith Park. There, Mayor Josh Collette and Kristen Bryant, a consultant with Rock Project Management who is assisting the city with the park redesign, gave a tour of the park and the improvements that will be made if the Washington Wildlife and Recreation Program (WWRP) — Local Parks grant is awarded. Also in attendance was Josh Martin, CEO of Summit Pacific Medical Center.
“This park really is one of the hubs of our community outside of the football field at high school,” Collette told the attendees. “This is a place where the community comes together.”
This grant application builds upon a Planning for Recreation Access grant the city received to develop a Parks, Recreation, and Open Space plan. The grant would fund improvements that include new sports courts, a playground designed for young children, accessible features, native shade trees and a rain garden. (At the city council meeting held on June 15, Bryant gave a presentation on the proposed improvements, which is available in the council packet https://www.cityofelma.com/meetings/recent.) The city is requesting $492,000 with a sponsor match of $211,000.
During the tour, Collett showed off the little league facility and emphasized the role of volunteers in constructing the concessions stand and the cooperation between the city and volunteers to maintain the facility. And if the city were to receive the grant, Collette shared that he anticipated volunteers would help install the playground.
Gesturing to the concession stand, Collette said, “This is a community of volunteers. Again, this facility was a volunteer effort. This wasn’t your typical small town, ‘We’re gonna raise a barn,’ but it’s a concession stand-type effort. … So in regards to getting the community to show up to help with an effort like this, I have no concerns about driving up volunteer support.”
“This is one of those success stories,” said Karl Jacobs, an assistant section manager for the parks team with RCO. “We offered that planning grant, which is pretty new, and you’re able to take advantage of that to really set yourself up for these future phases. You got a master plan, and you can start chipping away at it. And this is super common of what we see in a lot of small communities, where you got to create amenity [that is] well-loved, well-maintained, but it’s time for some upgrades.”
After Elma, the group continued to the Montesano City Forest where they met with city forester John Bull. The city of Montesano applied for a Community Forests Program (CFP) grant for the purchase of 240 acres of forestland adjacent to the city forest. Another stop in Montesano was at Nelson and Crait Fields, for which the city applied for a Youth Athletic Facilities (YAF) grant that would fund installing a new energy-efficient lighting system.
The final stop was a Grays Harbor Conservation District riparian restoration site along the Mox Chehalis Creek. Anthony Waldrop, a watershed restoration program manager with the Conservation District, walked the group through how the salmon state riparian grant would restore salmon habitat along a one-mile stretch of the creek by installing log structures to improve in-stream habitat and planting 19.1 acres of native vegetation to create a riparian buffer.
For the YAF, CFP, and WWRP Local Parks grants, the RCO board approves the preliminary ranked lists on Oct. 27, and the salmon recovery funding board will award grants on Sept. 15–16.
