Oregon water boss targets outdated laws
Alex Baumhardt
(Oregon Capital Chronicle) Lawmakers grilled Ivan Gall before naming him top Oregon water regulator.
Every Republican in the state Senate voted against the veteran of the Oregon Water Resources Department at his confirmation hearing in June. Majority Democrats who voted to confirm him warned they’d watch him closely.
Members of both parties called for “a change of direction” for the agency.
Gall, 55, steps into the role this month after two years as deputy director of the department during perhaps the most challenging period in Oregon’s water history. In less than a century, department officials have allocated all surface water under their purview, overallocated groundwater in several basins and have no clear accounting of how much water is still available in others.
Further compounding these challenges is climate change, which is causing dwindling surface and groundwater supply across the state while demand for water from cities, from agriculture and manufacturing is higher than ever.
“I think it’s fair to say that we’re going to be allocating less water in the future than we have in the past,” Gall told the Capital Chronicle in an interview. “There’s just less available out there.”
He said that will mean putting it to the best use and for the most urgent needs.
For Gall’s supporters, the highly charged legislative hearings leading up to his confirmation showed how politicized access to water has become in the state. To those critical of an agency insider – Gall has been at the department for 30 years in various roles – it showed how little trust exists between many heavy water users in the state and the Water Resources Department.
Yearslong waits for new water rights and water transfers, and a lack of technical assistance from the agency are among water users’ frustrations. Republicans and Democrats criticized Gall and the agency both for withholding water access from Oregonians for too long, and for recklessly awarding water rights in areas where little ground and surface water is left.
Gov. Tina Kotek, who passed on Gall for a year before deciding to nominate him to direct the Water Resources Department in May, also signaled she’d be keeping a close eye on his efforts to revamp the agency. She commissioned four prominent state lawyers to present state water policy recommendations to the same lawmakers who grilled Gall in June.
Fulfilling those recommendations will be difficult, said Meg Reeves, a former natural resources attorney and chair of the water resources commission of the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board who supports big changes in Oregon water policy and said Gall is the right person for the job.
“None of it is easy,” she said. “There are no easy decisions left.”
‘A tipping point’
Gall sees his tenure as water director as one in which he navigates “a tipping point in Oregon.” He hopes to rapidly modernize how the state accounts for and allocates water before it’s too late, and to think further ahead than his predecessors about Oregon’s freshwater supply.
“I don’t want to leave a bigger problem for the next generation to deal with. I think we need to start handling it now. It’s the responsible thing to do,” he said.
Gall is spearheading a review and possible changes to Oregon’s groundwater rules, many of which are more than 50 years old. He’s held public meetings around the state with environmentalists and heavy agricultural users to hear their perspectives and engender a greater sense of trust in the agency. He and other natural resource agencies are collaborating on updated groundwater rules and hope to present policy concepts to the legislature next year.
“We certainly heard loud and clear through the recruitment process and then the confirmation process how people are really frustrated,” Gall said.
Chrysten Rivard, Oregon director for the nonprofit Trout Unlimited, has worked with Gall on statewide water issues for more than two decades. She said in an email that he often has state water managers meet directly with local communities. She said he did this when the Water Resources Department was trying to deal with the boom in groundwater use after cannabis was legalized in 2015, and during the ongoing water allocation issues in the Klamath Basin when more resources and a direct interaction with communities in the region were needed.
They also teamed up to ensure that in the process of changing surface water allocations in the Klamath Basin that Crater Lake National Park would not lose its sole drinking water source by working with a senior water rights holder in the area.
“Something that would have caused terrible impacts to the tourism economy in southern Oregon,” she said in an email.
Besides hearing from Oregonians around the state, Gall said he is also coming up with ideas for stable funding for the agency so it has the resources to tackle its water permitting and transfer backlogs. This could mean, for the first time ever, charging Oregon groundwater users for the water they’re drawing.
“As far as I’m concerned, really, all ideas and options are on the table,” he said.
He added he does not want to create an expensive system of charging for groundwater use that brings in less revenue than it costs to maintain it.
Ultimately, Gall wants the Water Resources Department in the next century to be working efficiently for Oregonians, even if it means they learn they won’t get access to more water.
“For future generations, we don’t want to over allocate surface water or groundwater anymore,” he said. “At the same time, I want to have a system where, when a new applicant files a new application, we can get them an answer in a reasonable amount of time. The answer may be ‘no,’ but they’re not waiting two years to hear that.”