Havasu youth building future in COYOTE program

Five Lake Havasu City youths are building a future for themselves while creating habitat for fish through Mohave County’s COYOTE summer employment program.

The youths — Charley Narconey, 20, Riley Kennedy, 16, Jimmy Hill, 16, Chad Fox, 18, and Braulio Ruelas, 18 — are training as fisheries technicians with the Bureau of Land Management fish habitat project at Partners Point.

Working with volunteers and facility supervisor William Bryan, the COYOTEs are creating fish habitat from tree trimmings and depositing them in coves around Lake Havasu. They also work on projects to maintain and improve the facility, which sits on the lakeshore below the BLM’s field office on Sweetwater Avenue, about a mile from State Route 95.

COYOTE, or Coalition Youth Team, is a program of the county’s Workforce Development Division. The program pays youths ages 14-24 a stipend to receive training and gain experience working in businesses and government offices around the city. This year, thanks to federal stimulus funding, 40 youths are working in positions ranging from groundskeeper to dental assistant trainee to animal care technician, more than twice the number employed last summer.

At Partners Point, the COYOTEs are helping with a 16-year-old fish habitat project that has restored a fishery that was “just about dead,” Bryan said. The vegetation that was in place when the lake was created had slowly disappeared, leaving the lake bottom “as slick as a bathtub,” he said.

After a decade of depositing artificial habitat structures into 42 coves on the lake, the program shifted to habitat created from vegetation, such as palm fronds and trimmings from palo verde and mesquite trees. BLM receives the trimmings from local landscapers and the city.

“The nice thing is we keep all these acres of brush out of the landfill,” Bryan said.

The brush is bundled together and weighted down with sand bags, then deposited into the coves from a pontoon boat. The bundles of brush provide a protective structure for young fish to hide in and food for zooplankton, which the fish eat. The habitat restoration is also part of an ongoing effort to restore native fish species such as the razorback sucker, Bryan said.

“People don’t realize, if we didn’t have the fisheries program ... we wouldn’t have these more than 50 (fishing) tournaments a year,” he said.

Bundled palm trimmings will last two to three years before needing to be replaced, Bryan said. “Prime brush,” created from native trees like palo verde and mesquite, lasts longer. Bryan said he’s saving a stock of prime brush to be placed under the new dock as Site Six.

The Partners Point facility has the feel of a remote military outpost. Drinking water must be brought in and the only bathroom facility is a porta-potty. Power comes from a photovoltaic unit with a propane-powered generator as backup.

“We have no power here ... We don’t have water. We do have coyotes, we do have bobcats and we do have rattlesnakes,” Bryan said.

The equipment, much of it surplus or donated by other agencies and non-profits, has a vintage feel. The brush bundles are loaded onto the pontoon boats using a 1969 forklift, the same model Bryan used during his service in Vietnam. The program’s boats, with 3,000 to 4,000 hours on each engine, need frequent tender loving care.

Staff and volunteers are able to cool off in a structure built by volunteers with the Marine Corp Reserve and Anglers United.

“(That) is our haven at this time of year — powered by the sun,” Bryan said.

In addition to working under the somewhat rugged conditions, the COYOTEs at Partners Point are acquiring good work ethics that will prepare them to enter the job market, Bryan said. He sees the job site as giving a practical application to what the youths learned in workplace readiness classes at the beginning of the summer.

Bryan said the COYOTEs are learning how to work with tools and crew on a boat. They’re also learning more intangible skills like how to meet an employer’s expectations, get along with coworkers and stay safe.

“Teaching them to work safe I’d say is Number 1,” Bryan said.

While the youths are on site, Bryan is putting them through a boating safety course that will allow each of them to finish the summer with a boating safety certificate.

You may contact the reporter at dparker@havasunews.com.

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