This Act makes changes to laws about areas with ground water quality problems.
Modifies provisions of law related to declarations of ground water quality concern areas and ground water management areas. Directs the Governor to appoint an agency or agencies to lead an interagency team in ground water quality concern areas and ground water management areas. Provides that ground water management committees shall act in an advisory capacity. Directs or authorizes the Department of Environmental Quality, the State Department of Agriculture, the Water Resources Department, the Oregon Health Authority and the Department of Land Conservation and Development to take specified actions in ground water quality concern areas and ground water management areas. Takes effect on the 91st day following adjournment.
Amendment -1 amounts to sweeping overhaul of Oregon’s groundwater policy, threatening local decision-making, property rights, and transparency. This amendment grants unelected agencies excessive power to inspect private property, restrict rural development, and impose mandates without clear scientific evidence or due process. Farmers, homeowners, and rural communities will bear the brunt of these bureaucratic overreaches. We must act now to preserve liberty, privacy, and local control.
This amendment is a massive expansion of state bureaucratic power. Authorizes an unelected interagency team—under a Governor-appointed lead agency—to direct ground water investigations, inspections, permit reviews, and public messaging. These agencies gain authority to:
- Modify or revoke land use permits,
- Rewrite agricultural operating rules,
- Conduct private property inspections without a warrant, and
- Restrict homebuilding and well development outside urban boundaries.
No meaningful checks or opt-outs are provided to local governments or citizens. Once declared a “ground water management area,” local landowners are subject to mandates with limited appeal or due process.
SB 1154-1 undermines local decision-making and property rights. Permits counties to prohibit new homes unless they are hooked up to urban-style water systems or community wells—even in rural zones. It also allows DEQ inspectors to enter private property to examine septic systems, with only minimal notice, regardless of consent. The result is a top-down regime that weakens home rule authority and forces Oregonians to comply with broad state mandates crafted by unelected administrators.
Targets farmers without guarantees of scientific accuracy. Agricultural operations are heavily implicated in this bill, yet:
- No standards are set for how contaminants are scientifically linked to farm practices,
- Agencies can impose restrictions and recordkeeping mandates based on correlations, not causation,
- Nutrient applications and water use can be limited with little recourse for landowners.
This opens the door for regulatory overreach that punishes land stewards who have not been proven to contribute to the problem.
Affected: Farmers, Homeowners, Cities, Counties, Department of Agriculture, Department of Environmental Quality, Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, Department of Land Conservation and Development, Office of the Governor, Oregon Health Authority, Water Resources Department.
[From Representative Ed Diehl’s testimony]
SUBMIT TESTIMONY HERE before 4/10 at 1pm
EMAIL COMMITTEE
Sen.JeffGolden@OregonLegislature.gov
Sen.ToddNash@OregonLegislature.gov
Sen.FredGirod@OregonLegislature.gov
Sen.FloydProzanski@OregonLegislature.gov
Sen.KathleenTaylor@OregonLegislature.gov
This is a 100% no!
Vote no
Submitted to the legislative committee 4/8/25
Opposition to SB 1154: Alexandra P. Clarke
According to the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service 96.7% of Oregon’s farms and ranches are family owned and operated. Some are “corporate” farms because they are incorporated for tax/family succession plan reasons. (Source: p. 10 in Oregon State University Extension Service Rural Studies Program)
Agriculture is linked to Oregon’s economy with 15.4% of sales, 20.3% of jobs and 12.9% of value-added from the food and fiber industry. Food processing is one of the two top performing manufacturing industries in Oregon. Oregon’s economic strength depends on a robust agricultural sector. Agriculture including forestry, fisheries, food, and fiber support both rural and urban communities providing more than half a million jobs statewide; therefore, significantly contributing to national and international markets.
Oregon boasts 35,547 farms, 96% of those farms are family-owned and operated.
Larger farms make up less than 10% of the total. They make up two-thirds of the state’s agrarian economy. This balance provides the economic resilience Oregon needs to sustain its agricultural balance.
Oregon government resources report that their focus going forward is: water security and climate resilience, reliable agricultural workforce, livestock and animal disease prevention, and sustainable long-term industry strategies. The government is concerned with improving transportation infrastructure and making strategic economic investments, as such to foster a resilient agricultural sector.
Labor shortages and rising operational costs remain defining challenges for Oregon’s farmers and ranchers. Challenges to our agricultural sector are rising wages, housing affordability, market fluctuations, and workforce availability.
Oregon’s agricultural industry operates on thin margins with a competitive global market that puts pressure on agricultural businesses in Oregon to keep costs low impacting their ability to pay increasing wages. Our agricultural sector is constantly trying to adopt new more efficient methods to mitigate the high costs of production. These efforts are most important to keep farms operating, jobs, and economic well-being in our rural and urban communities.
Recently, Oregon has confronted a series of natural disasters not experienced previously on such a large scale that affected local rural areas’ economy. The 2024 wildfire season was the worst in the state’s history where, particularly in our agricultural community, rural areas suffered long term hardship due to crop and livestock losses and infrastructure damage where agriculture anchors local economies.
Federal and state recovery programs have had to step in to help producers replant, rebuild, and sustain their operations:
Oregon HB 1154 is literally “banking” on the fact that Oregon needs proactive strategies to reduce wildfire risk and strengthen emergency response systems to protect agricultural operations, limit crop losses, and help rural communities sustain agricultural operations. Government resources state that collaboration among state natural resource agencies is crucial for maximizing resources and building public trust.
The State claims that state and federal partnerships support modern irrigation infrastructure, watershed restoration, water availability, and nitrate reduction program efforts that provide immediate relief strengthening long-term water security.
Considering the information discussed above, this premise is certainly a false narrative supporting government, albeit surreptitiously, intervention and takeover of private water and land rights based on the fact that government intervention in water use is best governed/controlled by the government since it is said to “own lands under navigable waters and to hold such lands in trust for the benefit of the people of the state. According to this doctrine, these submerged lands may not be sold or otherwise alienated by the state except in a manner that promotes the public interest.” (Gifis, Law Dictionary 2nd ed) So, when does this control slowly morph to the government condemning property using the exercise of its eminent domain power? Does this bill lead into the public’s right of use or to benefit from such condemned property? Or, does that “public use” contribute to the general welfare and prosperity of the whole community (all of Oregon) or government coffers? Does a public use exist in HB 1154 or is it a mere public interest?
Once the state takes control of private water rights, controls its use, invades private property to make inspections, charges by meter measures, and pipes irrigation canals, along with other requirements created by the state powers that be, it will become economically dependent upon the water control related income stream to bolster government budgets. For example, look at Portland Water Bureau’s (PWB) manipulation of the city’s water to continue as the for profit arm of the city’s government with the power to cut off water to residents who do not pay their bill. The disaster at Boring where a bid to Portland City Council of $500-800mm to build a laser treatment plant at the Bull Run headwaters to filter out cryptosporidium quietly became a $2.2 – 3 B complex water filtration project encumbering Portland water users with 8% annual increases to their water bills in July for who really knows how long. All of this without the benefit of a public vote. Not only did the PWB ride rough shod over its own citizens, they transgressed their own timber land in Boring, used eminent domain to widen roads, tear down private fences, landscaping and more until the citizens of Boring filed a LUBA lawsuit where the state land use board finally handed a Stop Work order to Multnomah County.
As an aside, take a look at PWB salaries.
If HB 1154 passes, property owners throughout Oregon can expect much the same treatment once the legislature gives over such control over all state private and corporate property water use – water is a commodity all living things need to exist. Giving the government such broad powers over a lifesaving commodity with the ability to cut that lifesaving resource off is incredible leverage to produce ever increasing income for the government and to take private lands in the name of the public good and increased tax revenues for the state and its municipalities.
The information and facts used here were taken in part from the report at: https://www.oregon.gov/oda/Documents/Publications/Administration/BoardReport.pdf
Submitted by the Oregon State Agriculture Board Report 2025.
Sincerely,
Alexandra P Clarke, MAFM
PS (not submitted to legislative committee on4/8/25): My home is in the Collins View neighborhood in SW Portland near Lewis and Clark College and NW Law School. The residents voted c. 1969 to be annexed into the City of Portland. At that time, the neighborhood homes were for the most part on individual wells and septic tanks. The City immediately required that those homes cap their wells and be hooked up to city water and the septic tanks be decommissioned and the houses’ be connected to the City sewer system. When I moved to my home in 1988, my water sewer bill was $30 per month billed quarterly by volume with some fixed charges. Since that time, my Portland Water Bureau bill for water and sewer has exploded to between $150-223 per month for one person and one STR guest for an average of 15 days per month. PWB rate payers have paid for land acquisitions, new buildings, very high salaries/benefits for PWB employees. The leverage held by PWB, other agencies and bureaucracies over water and its resources is incredibly profitable. Portland water users are held hostage to the PWB’s increases without a vote or a say in the allocation of PWB resources and income. The new filtration plant being built in Boring as discussed above is a perfect example of what can happen throughout the state via Gov. Kotek’s abusive bureaucratic takeover proposal for Oregon’s water resources. This is all about money/increased income for the government coffers. Nitrites and environmental concerns is none other than a government smokescreen to enable its financial agenda as such.