Friday, July 29, 2022
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Housing: ‘At the end of the day, the growers are who we have to work with’
Continued from Page 1
Mahern-Macias said.
Mahern-Macias said commu-
nity advocates will have an import-
ant role to play in the negotiations,
since farmworkers may be reluctant
to directly voice their concerns.
The “power imbalance” between
farmers and workers makes it dif-
ficult for them to feel comfort-
able “speaking truth to power,”
Mahern-Macias said.
Farmworker advocates at the
meeting said it’s disappointing that
agriculture industry representatives
are involved in housing discussions
at all.
“Just the concept that we have to
have these conversations and tip-toe
around the farmers who are treating
people inhumanely seems wrong at
every level to me,” said Lisa Rogers,
assistant director of the Casa of Ore-
gon nonprofit.
Rogers said since farmworkers are
basically engaged in “indentured ser-
vitude” and their employers are resis-
tant to changing “horrendous” con-
ditions, the state government should
instead make community organiza-
tions responsible for housing.
“Maybe what you can do is
move more of the money away
from on-farm. Take it all away from
on-farm,” she said.
Even if the process is frustrating,
it is not possible for the state govern-
ment to “cut people out of the pro-
cess,” Mahern-Macias said.
“At the end of the day, the grow-
ers are who we have to work with
and we can’t change that,” he said.
Debating issues with the oppo-
nents may feel like “forever work,”
especially if little to no prog-
ress is made, but that is the reality,
Mahern-Macias said.
“The other side will continue to
exist and advocate for their own best
interests, always for the end of time.
It’s depressing,” he said.
While the Oregon Farm Bureau
has come to expect hostility from
community organizers, it’s “inap-
propriate and concerning” for a state
government representative to join in
these sentiments, Cooper said of the
comments on the video.
“We were shocked and surprised
to see such an embrace of those ideas
by a state agency,” she said.
The public information officer
for the Oregon Housing and Com-
munity Services Department, which
employs Mahern-Macias, said the
agency “takes stakeholders’ concerns
seriously” and is reaching out to the
Farm Bureau about the perception of
bias.
It’s troubling that “wild allega-
tions” about farmworker housing
are accepted as true without “vigor-
ous fact-finding,” Cooper said. “We
think there should be a more cautious
and fact-based conversation.”
Such negative comments raise
questions about how fairly farmers
will be treated in ongoing discussions
over housing standards and enforce-
ment, she said.
She said community advocates
fail to draw a distinction between
regulated on-farm housing and ille-
gal labor camps, such as those con-
structed by blackmarket marijuana
producers.
The Oregon Farm Bureau hasn’t
been notified of task force meetings
despite repeated requests, which
Cooper said feels like the organiza-
tion is being willfully excluded to
appease community advocates.
“It makes it really hard for us to
engage effectively,” she said. “These
processes are not transparent.”
State regulations have already
convinced many Oregon farmers
to expedite their plans to retire or
leave the industry, she said. “I think
that trend is absolutely going to
accelerate.”
Ultimately, housing regulations
that are economically unfeasible will
harm the workers they’re intended to
help, Cooper said. “We’re not going
to have farmworker housing if the
standard becomes so burdensome
that the employer can’t afford to pro-
vide it.”
Water: ‘We’re moving into water regime we don’t fully understand’
Continued from Page 1
due to its experience with
water levels in the affected
streams.
“Our concern is we don’t
feel like we see those flows
very often,” Perkins said. “We
have concerns that reality is
not going to match what the
models are saying.”
If the flow thresholds could
be adjusted based on new and
more reliable stream data, the
problem could be resolved,
said Megan Saunders, the irri-
gation district’s watershed
project manager.
Unfortunately, the OWRD
has told the irrigation district
that the conditions on its new
water storage right cannot be
modified based on updated
information, she said.
“Some way to incorporate
actual reality would be nice,”
she said.
Mateusz Perkowski/Capital Press
Jeff Stone, executive director of the Oregon Association
of Nurseries, advocated for the approval of a statewide
water supply grant program, but he thinks the rules are
in need of a major overhaul.
Mateusz Perkowski/Capital Press
Rep. Ken Helm, D-Beaverton, chair of the Oregon House Water Committee, recently
inspected a stormwater collection and aquifer recharge project in Beaverton, Ore.,
that’s partially funded with a state water grant.
Climate change ignored
Though Oregon’s govern-
ment wants to be proactive
against climate change, critics
say this rhetoric hasn’t been
reflected in its efforts on water
policy.
If the state’s leadership is
serious about facing the chal-
lenge, then water storage proj-
ects must compensate for
reduced snowpacks, said Jeff
Stone, executive director of
the Oregon Association of
Nurseries.
“The winter flow is going
to be more important than sus-
tained snow melt,” he said.
To anticipate such changes,
agricultural and environmen-
tal groups joined forces in
2013 to convince lawmakers
to pass Senate Bill 839, which
created the water supply grant
program.
Though the possibility of
constructing “big-ass dams”
is no longer realistic due to
environmental regulations, the
grant program was intended
to create a process for smaller
storage projects, Stone said.
“We were saying we should
not do water storage by fire
alarm,” he said.
For example, water diverted
during high winter stream
flows and stored off-channel
in aquifers wouldn’t encounter
as many environmental objec-
tions as traditional dams and
reservoirs.
Over the six grant cycles
the program has operated,
OWRD has disbursed $35
million to 31 applicants. Only
three grants, totaling about $4
million, went to projects aimed
at new, increased or restored
water storage.
“It’s never been imple-
mented in a way that would
allow it to succeed,” Stone said
of the grant program. “I really
thought by now we’d have
more tangible results.”
Grants have most fre-
quently focused on replacing
open canals with pipes, which
saves water by reducing seep-
age and evaporation. Such
water conservation projects
are important, critics say, but
they were supposed to even-
tually pave the way for new
water storage funding.
“It’s like a road that was
planned but never paved,”
Stone said. “We wanted to see
if the engine would turn over,
and efficiency was the easiest.”
Conservation and effi-
ciency are commendable
goals, but they can only go so
far for irrigators with insuffi-
cient water supplies, said Snell
of OWRC. “You can’t con-
serve what you don’t have, and
that’s the challenge for a lot of
these areas.”
Mateusz Perkowski/Capital Press
Mark Owens, R-Crane, vice chair of the Oregon House
Water Committee, examines his alfalfa field in Har-
ney County, Ore., which is contending with declining
groundwater levels.
‘Unmitigated disaster’
If the underlying grant fund
bill represented a victory for
compromise, the rule-making
that followed demonstrated
how easily such deals can
unravel.
“Rule-making was an
unmitigated disaster,” Stone
said. “Rule-making is where
good bills go to die because
everyone re-litigates all they
wanted in the first place.”
Disagreements over water
storage reflect a fundamental
difference in perspective.
For farm organizations,
declining snowpacks are a
prime argument for new water
storage. For environmen-
tal groups, climate change is
a major reason to be cautious
about such projects.
“We’re moving into water
regime we don’t fully under-
stand, and we don’t under-
stand our water needs even
under the current regime,” said
Karen Lewotsky, rural partner-
ship and water policy director
for the Oregon Environmental
Council.
“We need to clearly under-
stand the system — the hydro-
logic regime — we’re going to
be affecting if we do build stor-
age,” she said.
Furthermore, environmen-
tal advocates say it’s not unrea-
sonable for irrigators to make
concessions in return for tax-
payer dollars.
“This is public money. This
is not private money. There
needs to be a public benefit
to those public dollars,” said
Kimberley Priestley, senior
water policy analyst with the
Waterwatch of Oregon non-
profit. “They can go elsewhere
and they’re not subject to the
same standard.”
Few water storage grants
Disputes over water storage
haven’t stopped such projects
from receiving grant money
— at least, not directly.
The lack of water stor-
age grants isn’t the result of
OWRD rejecting such appli-
cations, said Kim Fritz-Ogren,
the agency’s water resources
development
program
manager.
“We’ve received very few
that are storage proposals,” she
said. “I don’t hear a lot about
a lot of storage projects being
pursued, but why that is, I
don’t know.”
The Oregon Farm Bureau
isn’t surprised that more farm-
ers and irrigation districts hav-
en’t applied for water storage
grants, despite the need for
such projects.
State regulators don’t
understand what it takes “to
make a project pencil,” while
grant rules effectively preclude
many storage proposals from
being economically feasible,
said Mary Anne Cooper, the
group’s vice president of gov-
ernment and legal affairs.
“It’s easy to bog down a
program with so many envi-
ronmental conditions that it
can’t meet its goals,” Cooper
said. “Our agencies are myopi-
cally focused on enforcing the
regulations and have lost sight
of the bigger picture.”
Lack of interest?
Critics say the water sup-
ply grant program isn’t the
only example of Oregon’s fee-
ble response to the challenges
faced by irrigators and other
water users.
Lawmakers
authorized
OWRD to make $40 mil-
lion in loans for water supply
development during the 2015-
2017 biennium. However, the
agency didn’t make a single
loan due to insufficient “stake-
holder interest.”
“There can be a number of
reasons there’s a lack of inter-
est in loans, depending on the
entity, but a common one is
concern about the ability to
pay back the loan,” said Fritz-
Ogren of OWRD.
The dearth of loan appli-
cations didn’t reflect a short-
age of potential demand, said
JR Cook, founder and director
of the Northeast Oregon Water
Association.
Rather, irrigators were
wary of borrowing money
from a state regulator, he said.
Cook’s organization has
facilitated the construction of
two pipelines to carry water
pumped from the Columbia
River to irrigators in the Uma-
tilla Basin.
The pipelines draw water
from the river in equal measure
— “bucket for bucket” — to
water saved upstream through
efficiency improvements.
The two pipelines cost $85
million to build, including $11
million in state money directly
authorized by lawmakers in
2015.
The association decided
against borrowing any money
from OWRD, afraid it would
impose provisions that would
hamstring the projects finan-
cially, Cook said.
“By placing it through a
regulatory agency, with all
these extra nuts and bolts, it
makes that funding inacces-
sible,” he said. “We are tak-
ing too much risk by saying
we can comply with the con-
ditions on the loan and repay
the loan.”
Innovative irrigators are
prepared to be the “guinea
pig” for new water strategies,
but the state can’t expect them
to do it at a financial loss, Cook
said. “Sometimes, you need to
feed the guinea pig, or it dies.”
Cook’s organization is now
planning for the construction
of a third pipeline to recharge
an underground aquifer and
serve agricultural, municipal
and industrial water users.
Though the state’s grant
program could potentially
pay for the facilities needed
for aquifer recharge, it cannot
cover operational costs.
Pumping the water and test-
ing the strategy would annu-
ally cost about $1 million for
five years, but further invest-
ment cannot move forward
without those prerequisites.
No investor or lender will
touch a project that’s as yet
uncertain to generate revenues
through water withdrawals,
said Gibb Evans, vice pres-
ident of IRZ Engineering &
Consulting, which is involved
in the project.
Those cannot begin until
the recharge and storage meth-
ods are proven, Evans said.
“You can’t do the recovery
piece, so nobody is going to
pay for that,” he said. “It’s like
a car without tires on it. Unless
you buy that last piece, it can’t
go anywhere.”
Cook believes it’s in the
state government’s interest to
help fund the project, so he
plans to seek an appropriation
from lawmakers.
However, he said, it’s
unfortunate Oregon doesn’t
have a coherent funding sys-
tem for such investments.
The OWRD’s “integrated
water resources strategy” con-
sists of vague objectives rather
than concrete steps that can
guide spending, Cook said.
Without a clear-cut path for
investing, lawmakers approve
haphazard water spending pro-
posals that aren’t tied to actual
“deliverables,” he said.
“It’s a rudderless ship,”
Cook said. “There’s nothing to
base that decision on.”
Game plan missing
Such criticisms are not lim-
ited to the farm industry.
The Freshwater Trust, a
conservation nonprofit that
pushed for the water grant
program, also wants a more
cohesive game plan for water
investments.
“Every deal is a one-off
and it doesn’t add up,” said
Joe Whitworth, its executive
director. “They’re not really
focused on overall outcomes.”
While Whitworth says no
state government is truly pre-
pared for future water prob-
lems, Oregon’s “integrated
water resource strategy” isn’t
much of strategy at all.
“Our ability to execute
against it meaningfully is
demonstrably not meeting the
needs of the state, and it’s not
going to,” he said. “It’s just not
utilizing tools that will make it
real.”
Oregon would benefit more
from an “analytics-driven”
process to steer funding
toward specific targets, with a
clear way to measure success,
Whitworth said.
“What is the biggest bite
out of crime we can take while
spending the least amount of
dollars?” he said. “We need
to describe the world we want
and pursue it.”
Questions that once seemed
hopelessly complex can now
be quickly resolved due to
massive advances in comput-
ing power, Whitworth said.
“We’re able to see things in
a way we’ve never seen before.
We can now play ‘Moneyball’
for watersheds,” he said, refer-
ring to the strategy a Major
League Baseball team used to
analyze which players would
produce the most runs for the
least amount of money.
‘Room for improvement’
Tom Byler, OWRD’s direc-
tor, agrees there’s “always
room for improvement” at
the agency — but he says it’s
important to keep certain his-
torical contexts in mind.
Lawmakers
eliminated
funding for OWRD’s dedi-
cated planning division more
than 30 years ago, he said.
During lean budgets in the
past, prospective future water
shortages may not have felt
urgent.
“I don’t think we were as
aware of the limitations on the
resources as we are today,”
Byler said.
Grants for water supply
projects are required by law
to meet social and ecological
purposes as well as economic
ones, all while complying with
existing state and federal regu-
lations, he said.
If requirements such as the
“seasonally varying flows”
aren’t working as intended,
OWRD is willing to discuss
potential improvements, as
well as the agency’s authority
to make such changes, he said.
“We are open to those con-
versations,” Byler said.
Water regulators are bound
by parameters set forth in law,
he said.
For example, the state con-
stitution imposed constraints
on the $40 million that law-
makers authorized for water
loans, Byler said. “We do not
have a lot of latitude in how we
administer the program.”
Lawmakers involved in
water policy acknowledge
Oregon’s shortcomings but
say those problems aren’t
being ignored.
“I think our agencies are
accepting that we’re entering
a long-term period of water
scarcity,” said Rep. Ken Helm,
D-Beaverton, the House Water
Committee’s chair. “Water has
to be a ‘top-five’ priority for
the next governor and the next
several legislatures.”
Oregon’s next governor
should also install a “water
czar” who’s able to coordinate
the state’s water initiatives,
Helm said.
“We need leadership
directly from the governor,” he
said. “There’s no substitute for
that.”
Oregon has numerous natu-
ral resource agencies that deal
with water to varying degrees,
but there’s currently too lit-
tle cooperation between them,
Helm said.
“It’s not built into their
agencies. It’s not built into
their budgets,” he said. “That’s
a systemic problem.”
‘Place-based planning’
In recent years, lawmak-
ers have invested in new meth-
ods of collecting data that will
assist in decision-making, said
Rep. Mark Owens, R-Crane,
vice chair of the House Water
Committee.
Lawmakers must also build
on the “place-based planning”
approach adopted in past legis-
lative sessions, he said. Com-
munities have been develop-
ing region-specific water plans
but currently lack the authority
to carry them out.
Such community-led pro-
posals won’t do much good
unless they’re put into action,
Owens said. “If we can’t fig-
ure out place-based implemen-
tation after we plan, we fail.”
In general, water solutions
with a broad consensus are
more likely to be successful,
said Snell of the Oregon Water
Resources Congress. The time
for striking such deals is now,
however.
“It’s not going to get any
easier,” she said. “There will
not be more water in the sum-
mer time or fewer conflicts
between entities.”