POULSBO — Fish Park has come a long way in the past three years, but that doesn’t mean it’s anywhere near finished.

With an abundance of walking trails, a couple of viewing platforms and signs of native vegetation and wildlife re-emerging in the 13-acre park, volunteers remain excited and optimistic about its future.

The next major effort at the Lindvig Way site during the winter months will be establishing a conifer forest to provide a corridor for wildlife traversing through the property, said Fish Park steering committee member Joan Hett.

“There are challenges with growing native plants,” Hett said.

The property, which is nestled in at the northern tip of Liberty Bay, was once used as a construction dump site for dirt. Because of that, new plants need extra nutrients to establish themselves, she said. So far, the replanting efforts have had moderate success. That hasn’t deterred park supporters.

The Liberty Bay Foundation recently donated 150 conifers to the park, but until the rains arrived en masse earlier this month, the conditions simply weren’t right for planting, Hett said.

Along with establishing the conifer forest, she said volunteers fight a continual battle against blackberries and other non-native species in their efforts to restore the property to its natural state.

Fellow Fish Park steering committee member Tom Nordlie said there is no shortage of things to be done at the park, and the community has played an important role in its evolution.

“We’ve tried to get local people involved in the park, so they can take ownership of it,” Nordlie said.

An Eagle Scout candidate, the Poulsbo Noon Lions Club, the Poulsbo-North Kitsap Rotary Club and a number of other community groups have put in countless hours of work at Fish Park, he said.

The next major construction effort at the site could take place as early as the summer of 2007, when two bridges are expected to be built across the stream channels which run through the property and into Dogfish Creek, he said.

The bridges will allow the city to remove a couple of culverts on the property and further enhance the salmon and wildlife habitat, Nordlie said.

For Suquamish Tribe salmon recovery coordinator Paul Dorn the park is an excellent example of what can be done to improve wildlife habitat in urban environment.

Even though the property is zoned as light industrial, Dorn said, “There will be no development of any kind here.”

Dorn credited this preservation effort to the vision of the Poulsbo City Council and former Mayor Donna Jean Bruce.