Kotek returns to Oregon’s Umatilla Basin as locals grapple with nitrate response

A year ago, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek promised a “new day” for the Lower Umatilla Basin’s decades-long nitrates crisis. When she returned to Boardman this week, Kotek told community leaders that there are many more days of work ahead before the crisis can be solved.

Since Kotek’s last visit, the state has conducted hundreds of well tests and provided filters or bottled water deliveries to many homes with high nitrate levels. Kotek’s 2023 visit was a milestone for residents of Morrow and Umatilla counties, where nitrate pollution had been a known issue for more than three decades by the time she arrived.

Wells are the primary source of drinking water in the region, and testing has shown nitrate contamination levels increasing, with some wells exceeding the federal standard for safe drinking water limit by five times.

Community members and state agencies have been working to begin to address the decades-long challenge. But local residents have grown impatient as levels continue to increase and little has been done to begin to clean up the issue.

“(It’s) not going to happen overnight,” the governor said Wednesday. “But we do need to say, ‘We’re going to do things differently.’ We don’t want to do three more decades of pollutants. That’s got to change.”

On Kotek’s return trip to Boardman, she was joined by Casey Sixkiller, a regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They met with local officials and people from organizations that have worked directly with the state to test wells and connect residents with clean drinking water. Their visit was less than a week after the head of Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality held her own town hall.

Kotek said her administration is still treating the issue with urgency.

Ana Pineyro, Morrow County’s health equity coordinator, told the governor the state should have more testing done by now. Pineyro said she and a group of fewer than ten people tested more than 600 wells over six months in 2022. According to Oregon Health Authority data, the state has facilitated 1,838 well tests since starting its outreach effort in July 2023. There are an estimated 4,500 wells in the Lower Umatilla Basin.

“How is it that with more time, more staff, more resources, we can (only) accomplish this? That’s a hard sell for the community, Pineyro said. “They’re waiting.”

In a meeting with people from the community organizations tasked by the state with helping Oregon Health Authority share information about nitrate contamination and connect residents with services, representatives shared other concerns with the governor.

OHA advertisements encouraging basin residents to test their wells weren’t urgent enough, they said. Translation services didn’t always include Mesoamerican languages like K’iche’ or Mam. And when residents had questions about next steps beyond filters or water deliveries, community organizations didn’t have clear answers for them.

“We’ve just been stuck with, ‘Wait, we’re getting information, we got to do this, we got to do that,’” said Griselda Paredes, the assistant director of public health support services for the Eastern Oregon Center for Independent Living. “But like everyone has been mentioning, we just want to see results now. Because it’s been a year, and there really hasn’t been much change.”

Kotek acknowledged that there is still work to do, but said the state could be more strategic now that it was no longer trying to grapple with organizing an immediate response.

“We have a year under our belt,” she said. “We haven’t completely established trust with the state. But I think we’re making progress.”

‘Long-term system issues’

Government authorities don’t have all the solutions for the nitrate crisis, but they should be upfront about that fact, Sixkiller said.

“There is value in going to the community and saying, ‘We don’t know what the answer is right now,’” he said. “We don’t know how much it’s gonna cost. But we want you to know that there’s gonna be a process and this is the process we’re going to follow.’”

Kotek and Sixkiller also met with local government officials on Wednesday. Local leaders reported that they were developing plans to extend treated municipal water to homes that rely on domestic wells. But the process had just gotten underway, and they couldn’t provide any timelines or a projected cost in what’s expected to be an expensive project.

Kotek said the state is mulling sending test strips directly to basin residents as a way to increase well testing.

But a long-term solution for the basin’s water crisis is still fuzzy. Studies have long shown that irrigated agriculture is the largest contributor to nitrates in the region. Irrigated agriculture’s nitrate use remains unregulated.

Kotek said it would be “premature” to introduce new environmental regulations to prevent nitrate pollution. But she also said that the status quo can’t hold forever.

“Bringing in water for the next two decades is not the way to do it,” she said. “We really have to follow up on these long-term system issues.”

State officials share details about ongoing response

Kotek and Sixkiller’s visit followed an earlier tour by state agency officials from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, the Oregon Department of Agriculture and the Oregon Water Resources Department. They held a town hall for community members from Morrow and Umatilla counties last week, updating residents on what each agency was doing to address and reduce nitrate contamination within their jurisdictions.

It was the first time DEQ Director Leah Feldon held a town hall to address the nitrate issues, and she was quick to say that not enough has been done by state agencies.

“Ultimately, safe drinking water is absolutely the priority, that’s why we’re here and DEQ’s job in partnership with the other agencies that are here tonight is to protect the groundwater that feeds the wells that you rely on,” she said. “We have not done enough. In addition to the public health efforts to ensure that people have access to clean drinking water, we must as a region and as a state do more to reduce the nitrate levels in the groundwater.”

So far, Feldon said, DEQ is reviewing wastewater permits in the region to be more “protective of groundwater” which includes limiting the amount each entity can apply to nearby farmland during winter months, when crops do not need additional fertilizer.

Last year, the agency reached an agreement under which the Port of Morrow would pay more than $2.4 million over repeated wastewater violations in the region. Under the settlement’s compliance plan, the port will reduce practices that result in nitrates entering groundwater during winter months and will provide more water treatment services and clean drinking water for local residents.

But earlier this year, DEQ found the port violated its permit more than 880 times in a four-month period, after reaching that settlement with the agency.

Feldon assured residents at last week’s town hall that DEQ had expected these violations to occur as the port makes adjustments to their permit, and that the port is on track to be in compliance by November 2025.

Feldon also spoke about the complications state and federal agencies face when seeking solutions and potentially facing legal issues over domestic wells.

“No agency has jurisdiction over domestic wells, that’s just a legal challenge,” she said. “… We do have a challenge to overcome in terms of federal or state. No one is funded to take care of domestic wells because they’re not connected to a system that is paid for. We do have some, at a root level, some real work to do with our legislators and with our federal agencies to figure out how are we going to support domestic wells.”

People who attended last week’s town hall, including two former DEQ employees, criticized the agency’s slow approach to figuring out solutions.

One former DEQ employee suggested a moratorium on additional agricultural development in the region until nitrate levels are reduced. That proposal was shot down by Oregon Department of Agriculture Director Lisa Charles Hanson, who said the first step in addressing nitrate concerns is working with farmers and producers to have a better understanding of what is occurring in the soil and increase monitoring.

“The soils here are incredibly unique, as sandy as there are, if we stop adding fertilizer, it depends on the depth, it depends on the crop,” she said. “In agriculture, there are lots of things, because it’s so complicated and interrelated. What I believe we need to do is make sure that anything we’re putting on, we’re not adding to the problem and that we aren’t pushing those nitrates down into the water system.”

State officials also joined the Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Water Area committee at a meeting it held on Friday. There, they once again discussed DEQ, ODA and the Oregon Water Resources Department’s efforts.

Feldon said a state agency action plan will outline the work each involved agency is currently undergoing to address the nitrate issues. The plan will use data like existing water quality monitoring and trend analysis from DEQ as well as newer actions like updated permits for regulated entities by each agency.

The state’s environmental and agricultural agencies will be working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop the action plan, but the federal agency will not be in charge of enforcement. That will still be the responsibility of each individual state agency under their authorities and jurisdiction, according to a DEQ spokesperson.

There is no timeline for when the state agency action plan will be finished