PSU professor leads breakthrough water rights agreement

A Portland State professor is leading a project that bridges the chasm between water conservation groups and Eastern Oregon farmers.

Steve Greenwood, deputy director of Oregon programs for the National Policy Consensus Center in PSU’s Mark O. Hatfield School of Government, was asked by Gov. John Kitzhaber to lead the implementation of a breakthrough agreement that grants increased irrigation water to Eastern Oregon’s Umatilla Basin.

Greenwood is part of a task force that brings together conservation interests, farmers and federal and state agencies. Kitzhaber launched the task force through Oregon Solutions, an organization overseen by NPCC that is dedicated to collaborative governance. The task force was organized in response to decades of polarization and failed negotiations in the Oregon Legislature.

“The group has actually agreed that they will not support or propose any legislation that goes outside of the agreement they have made,” Greenwood said. “The conflict begins, actually, with the basic fact that you’ve got the Columbia River rolling by the Umatilla Basin, and it’s a big river.”

Columbia River water rights have been a point of contention for decades. Since salmon were listed under the Endangered Species Act, access to Columbia River water has been restricted during irrigation months, which coincide with salmon runs, Greenwood explained.

“The whole notion here is that you need enough flow in the river to create velocity in that flow so that salmon can get down to the ocean in a timely way,” Greenwood said. Conservation groups have fought to keep additional water in the river to increase flow.

But Eastern Oregon farmers—whose crops in the Umatilla Basin range from famed Hermiston watermelons to onions and potatoes that fuel both local restaurants and national fast-food chains like Wendy’s—have appealed to the Legislature for increased water rights for decades.

“A lot of the farmers in the Umatilla Basin have been saying, ‘Boy, if we could get our hands on more of that water, we could grow more crops, and it would be a good thing for us and a good thing for economic development in the state,’” Greenwood said.

“These have been long-standing, very contentious issues. The parties have been very entrenched in their positions for a long time,” he added.

Changes in irrigation technology led Eastern Oregon farmers to pump groundwater. In just a few decades, heavy irrigation led to significant drops in groundwater levels. As a result, the Umatilla Basin was declared a critical groundwater area by the state.

“[This] cut people off from using what had been their water rights for groundwater,” Greenwood said. “So there is a lot of acreage—thousands of acres in that area—of land that used to be irrigated that is no longer irrigated.”

The task force has reached a threefold declaration of cooperation, signed after seven months of discussions.

The declaration emphasizes increased storage as a means of increasing efficiency.

“The first task is to create more storage for water so that we can store water from the Columbia when it is not needed for fish and farms and then release that water to the river during those times that it is needed,” Greenwood said. “It’s not technically accurate, but people talk about storing winter water for the summer.”

More efficient use of water rights and a more robust interstate and regional approach to water management are also key tasks that Greenwood will help implement.

“As an example, we met this week with Klickitat Public Utility District and talked to them about potential use of some unused water rights that they have from the Columbia River,” Greenwood said.

“[I]t was a very positive meeting. We are talking about 4,000 acre-feet of water that might be made available to farmers on the Oregon side. You know, that’s a pretty substantial amount of water.”

Greenwood has a background in natural resources and has been involved with a number of the center’s projects over the last decade. He teaches collaborative governance classes at PSU.

“We came up with solutions by consensus. [Kitzhaber] said if these people can come to a consensus on some options, he will personally try to implement those solutions,” Greenwood said.