When Morrow County declared a state of emergency in 2022 over the high levels of nitrates found in the Lower Umatilla Basin’s groundwater, the long-term response to the crisis was a jumble of local committees and state agencies that had made no discernible progress on lowering nitrate levels in more than 30 years. Nearly three years later, the governor is behind a bill that would put the state firmly in charge of groundwater quality across the state.

Senate Bill 1154 is an attempt to rework the 36-year-old Oregon Groundwater Quality Protection Act so that the state relies more on regulation and less on good intentions to fix groundwater pollution. This includes giving state agencies the authority to take action against agricultural polluters, a departure from the current policy that mostly promotes voluntary measures.

Despite being sponsored by Gov. Tina Kotek, the bill does not face a glide path to passage. The agricultural industry is mostly opposed to the bill as it’s written. Hundreds of well owners across the state also have lined up to stop the bill, which they view as an existential threat to rural life.

While the fate of the bill is still uncertain, the governor’s office has indicated that the status quo isn’t working anymore.

“1989 was a long time ago,” Chandra Ferrari, an advisor to the governor, told legislators in April. “The statute is due for a refresh.”

Red light, green light

The Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Area was established in 1990, just a year after the state’s groundwater act passed.

Oregon had discovered that the groundwater below the basin was high in nitrates, a substance that can cause cancer, respiratory illness and “blue baby” syndrome. Following the law, the state convened a local committee to come up with a series of voluntary measures that would potentially lower nitrate levels.

But the committee’s efforts failed. Nitrate levels continued to rise. In a statement, Kotek said the Lower Umatilla Basin helped inform the new policy.

“Over two years of responding to nitrate contamination in the Lower Umatilla Basin has taught us a lot,” she said. “Addressing contamination carries a hefty price tag, and requires extensive, long-term coordination between agencies and impacted communities. Threats to Oregon’s groundwater are only growing, and our toolbox for addressing them desperately needs to be updated.”

That update is Senate Bill 3411, which Ferrari compared to a traffic signal. For instance, a “green light” means groundwater is clean and safe to drink.

Under the bill, a yellow light would trigger the kinds of voluntary measures promoted by the current law. Red light designations would lead to stricter enforcement, reserved for areas with persistent contamination issues like the Lower Umatilla Basin.

The red light designations, dubbed “groundwater quality management areas,” would allow the Oregon Department of Agriculture to restrict the use or application of contaminants. The department could also make addressing contaminant pollution a condition of issuing permits.

This could have wide-ranging economic impacts since studies show that irrigated agriculture is the largest contributor of nitrates in the Lower Umatilla Basin. Basin farms that grow irrigated crops like potatoes and onions have long used fertilizer or nitrate-rich wastewater to maximize their yields. This approach has created commercial success – basin onions are sent to national chains like Chipotle and Subway – but it’s come at the cost of groundwater quality.

The Oregon Farm Bureau dinged the governor’s office for trying to pass SB 1154 on a “compressed timeline” and said the bill suffered from “procedural inconsistencies.”

Most Oregonians don’t own and operate large-scale farming operations, however, and opposition to the bill is much more widespread.

‘We’re not asking for permission’

SB 1154 received more than 800 pieces of testimony against it, most of which came from people who live far outside the Lower Umatilla Basin or any other groundwater management areas.

That broader opposition came from private well owners, who used language that was often angrier and more plain-spoken than their industry counterparts.

In the eyes of many of these owners, the bill wasn’t just bad policy but a potential violation of both the state and U.S. constitutions. While some testimony veered into conspiracy theories or anti-Democratic Party talking points, most of it focused on the perception that the bill would lead to the state controlling private water supplies or charging Oregonians for it. Many also took issue with the part of the bill that would allow the state to enter properties to inspect septic systems.

Across hundreds of pieces of testimony, domestic well owners wrote that it was God who granted them water, not the state. In their eyes, SB 1154 wasn’t a well-intentioned bill meant to keep their water clean, but a massive infringement on the water rights they’re entitled to and a cudgel from Salem against rural landowners.

One piece of testimony came from Steve Hammond, whose arrest for arson on public lands eventually triggered a 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, led by the Bundy family of Nevada. Despite being convicted of arson, President Donald Trump pardoned Hammond and his father in 2018, and the pair returned to ranching. Hammond opened his testimony on the water bill by citing the Oregon Bill of Rights and arguing that it gave well owners rights to manage their own water and “live free from unjust surveillance or taxation or fees masquerading as data collection.”

“We’re not asking for permission to access our own water,” he said. “That right is not negotiable!”

The governor’s office said the bill imposes no new requirements on domestic wells. But they did defend the provision on septic inspections. In her April testimony, Ferrari said that language was added in response to complaints from agricultural producers that they were being unfairly singled out for groundwater pollution. They brought up the possibility of faulty septic systems as being a contributor to nitrate pollution, so the governor’s office added the inspection language to the bill.

Measured support

Some of the staunchest allies of the bill were environmental groups and organizations that supported immigrant and Latino interests. The latter two demographics are heavily represented in the state’s three groundwater management areas and tend to be the most affected by the pollution.

One of the groups that testified in favor of the bill was Oregon Rural Action, a La Grande group that has advocated on behalf of Lower Umatilla Basin well users for several years.

“I’ve lost track of how many people I have met who have cancer or lost a loved one they never even got to meet because of miscarriage,” Oregon Rural Action organizer Kaleb Lay said. “The human cost of this is catastrophic.”

While the group supports the bill for now, Lay said it’s conditional on it not getting watered down further in the legislative process. While Oregon Rural Action has hosted Kotek on tours of the Lower Umatilla Basin, they’ve also found themselves at odds with her. The group previously criticized Kotek’s decision to allow the Port of Morrow to dump nitrate-rich wastewater on agricultural fields in January.

“We’ve seen Gov. Kotek bow to pressure from big industry and polluters over and over again,” Lay said. “We’re concerned that that could happen here again, and (we) really hope that it doesn’t.”

Even if the bill remains mostly unchanged once it reaches Kotek’s desk, Lay said there are still some areas of concern. While the bill does give the state department of agriculture the ability to more aggressively regulate polluters, Lay said it could perpetuate “industry capture,” the idea that regulators get too close to the industry they monitor and act in its interest rather than the public’s.

The governor’s office argued that the bill addresses this by more clearly assigning responsibilities to specific state agencies. If the public was unhappy with the direction of the rules or how the state was enforcing them, the rulemaking process and advisory committees would handle feedback.

“Senate Bill 1154 will make the state more accountable to local communities – in this administration and in future administrations,” said Anca Matica, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office.

None of Kotek’s ambitions can come to fruition without approval from the Legislature first. After the public hearing in April, the bill was sent to the Rules Committee, where bills can sometimes languish. That committee has yet to schedule a date to discuss the legislation further.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/05/05/governor-kotek-eastern-oregon-nitrate-groundwater-pollution-crisis-reform-bill/