Restoration Project 

Merriman Hollow Park Restoration

In 2023 the Alliance of Rouge Communities (ARC) received grant funding from the USEPA GLRI to design habitat restoration at Merriman Hollow Park and Wallaceville Park within the Rouge River Watershed. The Rouge River watershed is a designated Area of Concern (AOC) under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA) and has three Beneficial Use Impairments (BUIs) associated with fish and wildlife habitat: Degraded Fish and Wildlife Populations, Degradation of Benthos, and Loss of Fish and Wildlife Habitat. The Rouge River Advisory Council (RRAC), the Public Advisory Council (PAC) for the Rouge AOC, in March 2016 approved a list of projects that need to be completed to remove the Rouge AOC habitat BUIs. As part of that list, habitat restoration at Wayne County’s Merriman Hollow Park and Wallaceville Park were considered as having a significant impact on the removal of the BUIs.

As water quality in the Rouge River continues to improve, this project will build on past efforts to restore some of the damage done during the last century. Tributaries of the Rouge River have suffered from loss and impairment of aquatic habitat and increased frequency and magnitude of flood flows, primarily due to increasing urbanization within the watershed. The flat river slope and the meandering channel cannot pass the large flows associated with rain events. Upstream urbanization continues to exacerbate this problem as runoff from increased flooding within the river system,bank erosion, and continued habitat degradation.