For years, Oregon state agencies, local governments and committees have hashed and rehashed plans to clean up a decadeslong nitrates pollution problem in northern Morrow and Umatilla counties. While nitrate levels continue to rise, there’s one constant: These groups say they need more resources and money to get the job done.

Whether they’ll get it in the near future is not clear.

“The challenge is this is obviously a long-term and expensive project,” state Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, told OPB. “And we don’t have much bandwidth for expensive projects right now with taxpayer money.”

For decades, waste carrying nitrates from large livestock farms, food processing facilities and irrigated farms seeped has through the Lower Umatilla Basin’s soil and into the groundwater below.

Overexposure to nitrates has been linked to illnesses like cancer and thyroid disease and is especially harmful to infants. This is a major concern for domestic well owners in rural areas, since private wells aren’t subject to federal environmental protections.

Golden, who chairs the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Wildfire, suggested he’d like the Legislature to get more serious about the problem, and even explore alternatives outside state government for funding clean up efforts.

“One of the things you have to ask is, is there a path [to] funding from the parties who are responsible for most of the nitrate pollution?” he said. “Because the taxpayers are not going to be able to pick up the whole tab. Now, when you start asking that question, the conversation gets tougher.”

However, Kaleb Lay, the director of policy and research at Oregon Rural Action — a nonprofit which has advocated on behalf of residents — suggested a different approach. He said the government needs tougher enforcement to rein in the source of nitrates in the drinking water. much of it coming from irrigated agriculture, large livestock farms, food processors and faulty septic systems.

“I don’t think just throwing money at it’s gonna fix it,” Lay said. “The willpower needs to come first.”

At a Tuesday hearing in Salem, the Legislature received an update on the drinking water crisis in the Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Area from state agencies. But questions over how the state would fund its ambitions to clean up the basin and connect residents with clean water went without clear answers.

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Lawmakers have already debated, and even scrapped, proposals attempting to address the problem during this Legislative session.

Gov. Tina Kotek is backing a bill that would revamp how the state responds to groundwater pollution, but a spokesperson for the governor’s office said the bill would not apply to the Lower Umatilla Basin.

Many state officials and speakers at Tuesday’s hearing said the state needs to put more resources toward nitrate reduction in the Lower Umatilla Basin and beyond if Oregon wants to achieve its goals. But they tended to shy away from specifics.

Karen Lewotsky, the rural partnerships and water policy director for the Oregon Environmental Council and a longtime member of a local committee involved in remediation efforts in the Lower Umatilla Basin, said the committee’s work suffered from the state shifting its priorities away from groundwater and from an overall lack of resources.

“Agencies need dedicated, secure funding to do this yearslong work, and we need to have the executive and the legislative branch willing to provide that stable funding,” she said.

Some of that work will include a significant price tag. A representative from the Morrow County Clean Water Consortium, an intergovernmental group raising money to connect domestic well owners to municipal water systems, said the group is seeking $2 million in state and federal funding to get some projects done.

Ricardi Duvil, a technical advisor for the Environmental Protection Agency, told lawmakers the state’s work needed “resources, resources, resources.” But when Golden asked Duvil what kind of resources the EPA could provide, Duvil said he was an engineer and questions about resources could be answered by a “different unit.”

Golden later asked Geoff Huntington, a natural resources advisor, if state agencies had an “integrated” budget for their nitrate reduction work. Huntington said they didn’t and instead, they were funding projects in a “piecemeal” fashion, meaning the state would continue to split its response by individual agencies rather than consolidating it under a single source.

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Golden did say with certainty he won’t be pushing for funding from the state’s general fund this session. That’s because lawmakers will likely have to make tough budget choices following the release of the state’s revenue forecast on Wednesday.

Instead, he said, he’s focusing on much needed wildfire funding following federal cuts. But the Lower Umatilla Basin is still a close priority, he said.

“We’ve got some really fundamental needs that we’re not sure how to fund. And this is one of them,” he said. “It’s going to take some of the major parties who’ve been out there and have been unintentionally involved in the contamination of the aquifer to be willing to step up some and exactly what that looks like remains to be seen.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/05/15/oregon-lower-umatilla-basin-nitrates/