For 83-year-old Lona Norman, having the money to dig a deeper well made the difference between staying in her Central Oregon home and being forced to sell the property.
“I’m in my comfort zone,” she said. “I feel safe here.”
Norman lives near La Pine, but is outside the range of city services. Like nearly 1 in 4 Oregonians, she relies on a private well for her primary source of potable water. As drought and pumping worsen the decline of aquifers across Oregon, rural homeowners like Norman are first to pay. She needed to come up with more than $20,000 for well repairs, but she’s on a fixed income. So, Norman’s daughter helped her navigate how to ask Oregon for help.
Drillers construct a new domestic well, shown in this July 5, 2022 file photo, east of Bend, in Deschutes County, where property owners have drilled more than 1,100 new wells since 2020. The drilling company's waiting list is over six months long, a representative said.
Emily Cureton Cook / OPB
Theirs was among 153 applications that were recently approved for state grants to help low- and moderate-income homeowners with failing wells. But the program could soon disappear. That’s because the Legislature’s $168 million drought package passed in June did not renew the funding. Administrative backlogs, narrow eligibility requirements and long wait lists for well construction have all worked against the program, as officials who support it hope they can secure more money later this year.
Oregon’s Well Abandonment Replacement and Repair fund offers up to $40,000 per project if the applicant is a homeowner, meets federal income guidelines, and lives in a county affected by drought or wildfires. About three quarters of the applications to date have come from Deschutes, Klamath and Jackson counties.
The fund still has about $1.25 million unspent from its roll out in 2021. That money will run out as requests continue to pile up. Last year, state officials received more than 800 reports of dry or failing wells across Oregon.
Josh Dragt’s Deschutes County application for well repair funding was rejected last month because he didn’t meet the income requirements, according to state records. Reached by phone, Dragt said he runs his own upholstery business in La Pine, where he lives with two daughters, ages 6 and 9.
“I have a small business and [the state] went off the amount that I made before the deductions of my materials,” Dragt said. “I’m definitely not high income.”
His family’s tap water became a trickle last summer. This summer, things got worse.
“I had just a little bit of water at a time. We just took really, really quick showers, and we couldn’t do laundry,” Dragt said.
When the state said he didn’t qualify for a $10,000 grant, the upholsterer emptied his savings to dig a new well. It wasn’t enough.
“My mom loaned me another $6,000, but she had to take a loan out to do that,” he said.
Once he came up with the money, Dragt contacted three well drillers. One told him it would be a four-month wait, Dragt said, but another driller took pity.
“When I told the drilling company that I had two young daughters living with me, he bumped me to the top of the list.”
Income eligibility is the most common reason a person is denied for the well fund, said Kim Fritz-Ogren, a section manager with the Oregon Water Resources Department.
Federal funding and Oregon lawmakers sent that agency a total of $5.4 million in 2021. It took a year for OWRD to start taking applications, and the payments to well owners did not start until last fall, state records show.
Fritz-Ogren said staffing capacity initially caused a backlog, but people who apply now can expect an answer within a couple of weeks or sooner.
“As we enter summer, more wells are going to go dry and so there’ll be more folks applying and in need of help,” Fritz-Ogren said.
The program has several known challenges ahead. The fund’s coordinator left their job last month, and its remaining $1.25 million could run out before next spring.
“That doesn’t mean there’s not a huge need,” said State Rep. Mark Owens, a Republican from Harney County, where declining groundwater is a well-documented crisis.
“I will be disappointed as a legislator if we cannot figure out how to capitalize that [well] fund with more money in the next six to eight months, before it runs out,” Owens said.
He sits on Oregon’s emergency board, which approves state agency requests for money when the Legislature is not in session. Owens said he would support sending more to help rural well owners.
“I believe if we can show… that the fund is being depleted, we can make a good ask,” he said.