An illustration shows how a powerful agricultural well can siphon water away from a shallower domestic well.
Special for OPB
Oregon water regulators have spent the last three years working on a plan to prevent groundwater declines that could cause roughly 40,000 home wells statewide to dry up. That plan now has a crucial greenlight.
The Oregon Water Resources Commission unanimously voted for a string of groundwater rule changes Thursday. The commission oversees the state’s Water Resources Department, where regulators say there is a clear need to better protect sustainable groundwater.
“This is about making responsible choices now to support Oregonians and the state’s water future,” commission chair Eric Quaempts said in statement after the vote.
The water department has said many future applications for groundwater rights are likely to be denied.
This anticipated crackdown comes nearly 70 years after a 1955 state law called on regulators to protect “reasonably stable” groundwater levels. A 2021 investigation by OPB showed how for decades the state kept allowing additional wells in places where water wasn’t available, or data wasn’t used to make decisions. The practice left rural communities like those in the Harney Basin with failing home wells and shriveled streams.
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Now, regulators say they will define “reasonably stable” using scientific data, and require would-be water users to prove the water is available before Oregon issues permits for wells. The rules are intended to apply to new water rights, and won’t cut off any existing ones. The rules also don’t apply to domestic well owners.
Many conservation groups cheered the changes as a step in the right direction.
“Water levels have been dropping for decades in thousands of wells across Oregon,” Zach Freed with the The Nature Conservancy said in a press release Thursday. “It’s not just a problem for Oregonians on the dry side of the state. These new rules will help prevent further impacts of overallocation from the coast to the high desert.”
Agricultural interests and cities in Central Oregon have pushed back on the potential economic fall out of the rule change, while two tribal governments objected to the state’s process for consulting with sovereign nations.
A committee that helped write the rules found they’ll likely make economic and racial inequities worse by further consolidating power in the hands of people who already control water rights, making permits to use water more expensive to acquire.
Officials with the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs objected to the rules for “starting at the wrong place, because they do not aim to restore groundwater levels to historic ones,” according to a state report summarizing more than 1,300 comments the water department got about the changes.
The rules take effect immediately once the water department files them with the Secretary of State.
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Interests from individual basins can petition the water department to write their own definitions of “reasonably stable,” OWRD Groundwater Section Manager Justin Iverson told OPB. This kind of carve-out would ultimately need approval from the water resources commission, he said.
Central Oregon cities in the Deschutes Basin lobbied against the rule changes, which city leaders have said will make it difficult to build much-needed housing to accommodate population growth.
Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler offered opposition in written comments, saying the allowance for basin-specific rules “has vague sideboards that are not clear, and there’s no dedicated support from the [Water Resources] Department.”