The biggest livestock farms could have been prohibited from building new or bigger facilities in some of Oregon’s most polluted groundwater regions under a state legislative bill environmental groups were backing. But it won’t happen this year.

The bill won’t make it to the legislative floor, following a contentious hearing in Salem.

For years, many residents living in the Lower Umatilla Basin in Eastern Oregon have demanded the state government rein in the sources of pollution that have caused a decades-long nitrates crisis in the area, primarily by nitrates from irrigated agriculture and nearby food processing facilities.

That area sits on what’s known as a Groundwater Management Area — designated by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality because of elevated levels of nitrate pollution in groundwater. There’s another area with such designation in the southern Willamette Valley and one in northern Malheur County.

Senate Bill 80 would have prohibited Oregon from permitting new or bigger dairy farms and other big livestock operations from seeking a confined animal feeding operation, or CAFO, permit, in all three of those areas.

The bill would not have cleaned up existing nitrate pollution, but it could have helped prevent contamination from getting worse, said Kaleb Lay, director of policy and research at Oregon Rural Action.

“It’s a really small targeted thing that would just keep things from getting worse, definitely not targeted at actually solving the larger groundwater problem,” Lay said. “You never fix up a leak in your house before you turn off the water, right? Otherwise, you’re just endlessly trying to clean up a leak and getting nowhere.”

But following testimony including both ardent support and opposition to the bill at a hearing last week in Salem, Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, chair of the Senate Committee On Natural Resources and Wildfire, tabled the bill.

“We will not be moving this bill out of this committee,” Golden said. “This is obviously an explosive issue. There’s absolutely no chance there will be enough alignment to pass this legislation this session.”

Some environmental groups said they were caught off guard by Golden’s decision, others said they were disappointed.

“This bill was such a small piece of a larger puzzle that it’s surprising to me it didn’t move forward,” said Amy van Saun, a senior attorney at the Center for Food Safety’s Portland office.

In a written email to OPB, Golden said he’s surprised anyone was caught off guard by his decision.

“Early in the session I let folks know that legislators probably had very little appetite to take on another CAFO bill after the intense battle over Senate Bill 85 in 2023. That proved to be right,” he said, referring to a reform package that included stricter water use and construction requirements for CAFOs.

That bill drew heated debate too from both farmers and environmental advocates. It originally included a moratorium on new CAFO facilities in Oregon, although legislators scrapped those plans before passing the legislation.

“Even knowing that, the crisis in the Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Area is so severe that I wanted advocates to be able to make their case on the public record and launch a necessary conversation,” Golden said. “That’s what the public hearing was for.”

Farm groups say this bill arbitrarily targets an industry that’s already struggling to adapt to changing rules and burdensome bureaucracy.

“Senate Bill 80 proposes to prohibit operations that are already under immense scrutiny and operate within a system of complex regulations, which have been updated as recently as last year,” said Katie Murrey, executive director of Oregonians for Food and Shelter, a lobbying group for farmers that opposed this year’s failed attempt.

Golden said he’d like to keep tackling the Umatilla groundwater issue after the legislative session.

“If this were an easy problem to solve that didn’t require change and adjustment, and maybe some pain and inconvenience for some people, it would’ve been solved long ago,” he said during the hearing. “If we’re serious about doing this, and people say they are, it’s going to be hard.”

Meanwhile, recent reports from DEQ showed the nitrate problem in the Lower Umatilla Basin has become worse over the past decade, even as Gov. Tina Kotek has introduced efforts to reduce nitrate levels in the area.

Source - https://www.ijpr.org