The Bulletin recently ran a story titled “Farmland or housing? Advocates, Deschutes County dig in on rural land use fight“, which discussed opposition by Central Oregon LandWatch to county efforts to rezone farmland for housing and other uses. There is long standing tension between those who want to develop outside current urban growth boundaries and those who want higher density within the UGB. More nuance is provided in the story but omitted was any discussion of water. UPDATE: the Bulletin ran a slightly shorter and lightly edited version of this which I submitted.

Water seems to only be a topic of general discussion during periods of extreme drought, but its scarcity is enduring and accelerating. Global warming continues to trend higher. While not as extreme as recent years, much of Oregon experienced drought conditions this year. Local water tables continue to fluctuate but trend down overall with estimates of 20 foot declines over the past 20 years. The problem has become bad enough that the Oregon Water Resources Department has stopped issuing new groundwater permits without evidence that an aquifer has become “reasonably stable”. (If you want to dig in on this I have an entire section on this blog related to groundwater.)

New housing in rural areas will be able to get around this problem via a loophole called “exempt” wells. Homes outside of municipal water service largely get their water from a well which is exempt from needing a groundwater permit. There are over 16,000 of these wells in Deschutes County. Hundreds of these wells have gone dry in the past few years necessitating drilling deeper at significant cost to homeowners and taxpayers who help subsidize the cost.

I have an exempt well on my property and know they are problematic. As already mentioned, they may be drilled without a groundwater permit that meets the condition that an aquifer is “reasonably stable”. Additionally, while there is a legal limit to how much water may be taken from an exempt well there is no requirement for measurement of water use and no monitoring. As a result, an exempt well could take an extraordinary amount of water with little to no risk of repercussion.

Even the legal limit of 15,000 gallons a day of water use is astonishing. For context, while water use varies seasonally, more used in the summer and less in the winter, the average home in Bend uses 286 gallons a day and the average home in Redmond uses 173 gallons. These homes are metered and charged a tiered rate based on usage. Exempt wells pay nothing for the water they extract.

This outrageously inequitable. It also has a negative impact on groundwater levels which supply springs and rivers along with the fish and wildlife that rely on them. Local cities have done an excellent job reducing the amount of water consumed on a per household basis. No such efforts have been undertaken by Deschutes County.

If our commissioners want to allow housing development on rural lands they should require that new exempt wells have metering devices installed, they should develop a monitoring program for these devices, and they should implement a tiered rate charge that encourages the conservation of water. It likely rare that an exempt well extracts more than 15,000 gallons a day, but it seems reasonable to have increasing fees charged to homeowners at far lower usage levels.

Over time, existing exempt wells, like mine, could also be required to install meters, such as when a home sells or when a permit is issued for a remodel. Cities meter and charge for water, the county should do so as well. This would be a heavy lift and many details to work out but we need to do everything we can to manage our water supply. A true water crisis is not imminent, but it can be seen on the horizon.

There is another water angle on this topic. What should be done with water previously used for irrigation on farmland that is converted to other uses? Is it right that that water be retained by irrigation districts and not returned to the river where it originated? That’s a whole new can of worms but one for our state, not county, representatives.