Oregon struggles – Every year, about 90% of Central Oregon’s Deschutes River is drawn away through canals and pipes—leaving the river reduced to a creeklike trickle in summer and early fall. Oregon lawmakers and water officials are trying to stretch what’s left through three mai
When the Deschutes River is supposed to run high, much of Central Oregon can instead hear the sound of what isn’t there. Between April and October, what’s left of the river—described as one of the largest spring-fed waterways in the U.S.—often looks more like a creek trickling out of Bend, Oregon.
The reason is mechanical and relentless: about 90% of the river disappears into networks of canals and pipes that carry water across the high desert. Six irrigation districts—quasi-public corporations—use that diverted water to green up properties owned by about 7,500 landowners.
Of the six, none is as powerful as the Central Oregon Irrigation District. It holds rights to use more than half of the Deschutes’ volume—more than all the other districts combined. Under Oregon law, in times of scarcity, most of the other districts must cut back to protect COID’s share.
During the last drought. state water law forced commercial farmers downstream to fallow their land while COID diverted four times what its landowners’ crops consumed. an Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica analysis of state data found. In response, COID pointed to one central dispute: it did not trust the satellite-based data used in the analysis. Oregon lawmakers backed a study to examine water availability. and state water managers did not dispute the analysis—leaving the disagreement to sit. unresolved. inside a larger fight about what the river can afford.
In this legal system. keeping water rights means proving water is used “beneficially.” COID landowners are doing exactly what the law encourages them to do. state legislators said. Reporting found that in the district. more than 9 out of 10 acres were pasture—grass for grazing or landscaping. or hay for livestock—considered beneficial under Oregon water law.
To Oregon lawmakers, that matters because the political barrier is not technical so much as structural. Oregon and other Western states have so far rejected legislation that restricts what people can grow or how efficient they must be. in large part because water rights are treated as property rights. Water rights can also raise property values and can bring agricultural tax breaks.
“Affluent people are moving into Central Oregon for reasons that have nothing to do with growing a crop. ” said state Rep. Ken Helm, the Democratic co-chair of the House Committee on Agriculture, Land Use, Natural Resources and Water. Helm said the politics of changing bedrock water law are brutal. “If lawmakers took on bedrock water law. ‘we’d get crushed by the powers that be and we might even not be reelected. ’” he said. “What should we do?. I think we should leave more water in the river. Legally speaking, that doesn’t have to happen,” he added.
Helm’s frustration matches what COID’s own infrastructure makes possible. COID diverts water from the Deschutes River through roughly 30 miles of canals and pipes to irrigate fields and estates at the Ranch at the Canyons development in Terrebonne. Oregon. The subdivision’s website promises owners of its multimillion-dollar mansions “the peaceful rhythm of agricultural life — without the work.”.
COID’s leadership frames the challenge differently. COID’s Managing Director Craig Horrell said he “can’t tell people what they can and can’t farm. ” and he said the district’s job is to distribute water to its customers and to “deliver it much more efficiently and sustainably in the future.” The question for Oregon is what “more efficiently” can mean when the river is being pulled through a system built long before today’s drought patterns.
Oregon has pressed three main solutions: pipes, sharing, and data.
The first is pipes. COID delivers most of its water through open canals built 120 years ago. Because the canals are blasted from porous lava rock. they have to be completely full for gravity to push water across COID’s more than 42. 000 acres. Nearly half the water evaporates or seeps into the ground under the canals before reaching its destination. and COID’s state water rights factor that into how much it is allowed to take.
Replacing the canals with pressurized pipes could save a lot of water, but the timeline and price have slowed momentum. COID’s proposed move could take 50 years and cost more than $700 million. The district is in the final planning stages of what could be a $360 million project to pipe a main artery leading to more than a thousand landowners between Bend and Redmond. Oregon. Few in that area make their living as farmers. In exchange for federal and state funding for piping. COID has pledged to send water downstream to farmers outside the district.
The plan has won broad support, including from Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley. who told OPB and ProPublica that “Repeated severe droughts make every drop of irrigation water highly valuable. and the best way to preserve irrigation water is to pipe it.” Merkley said the focus on COID was driven by a threatened species of frog living exactly where irrigation districts have long siphoned water. destroying habitat. To avoid lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act, the districts agreed to leave more water in the river over time.
That’s where the tension shows. As COID shifts from canals to pipes. it’s supposed to send the saved water to a neighboring district. North Unit. which would take less from the river as part of a restoration plan for the frog’s home. North Unit serves a valley known for commercial farms but is already water-poor. and it has rights to far less water from the Deschutes than COID does. At a March public meeting in Redmond. Evan Thomas. a fifth-generation farmer and leader of North Unit. put the stakes plainly: “This pipe has to go in the ground by 2028 or North Unit. all of Jefferson County. basically quits farming.”.
Even some supporters concede piping won’t stop COID from diverting more water than its customers need. or from sending that water to many residential properties growing grass and pasture. Last year, the nonprofit Central Oregon LandWatch pushed for a bill to put limits on overwatering. Helm and Republican state Rep. Mark Owens started drafting legislation, but they never introduced it. Owens, a hay farmer in Eastern Oregon, said irrigation districts weren’t happy with the proposal. “I weakened,” he said. “We weren’t going to get it through the building. We lived to fight another day.”.
The second solution is sharing.
Deschutes River Conservancy Executive Director Kate Fitzpatrick said the river has never had enough water for all the landowners who laid claim to it more than a century ago. She said leaving water in the river for fish and wildlife wasn’t considered a legal. beneficial use of the resource until the 1980s.
“So that’s what we’re working with,” Fitzpatrick said. “We’re not going to win the game by pointing fingers at who’s doing what with the water.” Her nonprofit works with irrigation districts to roll out incentives for landowners to be more efficient or share voluntarily. One program pays landowners to dry up land so COID will leave more water in the river. but the district limits participation and the program’s efficacy has plateaued for decades. state data shows.
State lawmakers created a pilot “water bank” program last year, a shift Fitzpatrick’s world has been pushing toward. The concept could allow COID landowners to keep what water they need and rent out excess to farmers downstream without losing rights. Yet since Oregon’s governor signed the bill into law nearly a year ago. COID and other key players haven’t signed anyone up. Horrell said the reason is straightforward: the canal system fails if it doesn’t have enough water in it. Piping could allow the district to scale up other solutions in the future, he said.
There is also a practical snag. To rent out part of a water right without completely drying up their property, landowners would need to measure their use precisely—something many don’t want to do.
The third solution is data.
COID said it doesn’t measure or report the volume of water it delivers. That is typical across Oregon, where the vast majority of water goes to agricultural lands. Policymakers and experts have long argued Oregon can’t tackle shortages without knowing how much people with irrigation water rights use on their properties.
Efforts to require meters on all individual farms and wells have faced fierce backlash. Owens recalled that “At one point my office was getting a call a minute” during an effort last year. The fear Owens described is that the state will use data to take away water rights or try to charge by the gallon. Owens said he has given up on trying to force statewide metering for now.
Instead. Owens has started a pilot on his own Eastern Oregon hay farm using a weather station and satellite data to track how much his fields drink. He said he can check on his phone and see how many days he should irrigate the following week. Owens also led Oregon’s investment in a cutting-edge study to apply that technology to statewide water planning. Scientists with the Oregon Water Resources Department co-authored a report with researchers from the Nevada-based Desert Research Institute. The report provides estimates over nearly 40 years of how much water crops consumed on every irrigated field in Oregon. OPB and ProPublica used the data in their reporting, and it was published last year.
Horrell said such data has too many variables and is not ready to guide how COID monitors water use. Oregon Water Resources Department Director Ivan Gall said the state is not currently using that data to regulate how water is used. Instead, he said it is used to account for where water goes. Gall also said tight state budgets have so far kept his agency from sharing the data “with the public and decision makers in a way that is understandable and meaningful.” Owens and Helm said they tried and failed to make it easier to learn from critical data about Oregon’s water—how much there is. how clean it is. where it’s coming from and where it’s going—but a pilot project ground to a halt after state funding dried up last year.
The facts sit in a stubborn knot. COID’s share is protected under scarcity rules; COID landowners satisfy “beneficial” use through pasture and hay; the district’s canals lose nearly half the water through evaporation and seepage; and the alternatives—pipes. water banking. and better measurement—run into costs. infrastructure limits. political fears. and timing deadlines set by water-poor downstream farming communities. In the middle of it all. the river keeps shrinking between April and October. while Oregon tries to figure out how to save something it can’t simply declare more plentiful.
Deschutes River Oregon water law Central Oregon Irrigation District COID Jeff Merkley Ken Helm Mark Owens water bank program piping project water rights Endangered Species Act frog habitat Ivan Gall