Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

uh public comment we have oh yeah we need to vote for the minutes excuse me it's my first time in the captain's seat here um all in favor say aye aye approval of minutes Next on the agenda, public comment. Ms. Gould, thank you for coming. I see that you have a blue sheet. And just a reminder that we have approximately three minutes. Perfect. So thank you for being here.

My name is Nunzi Gould. I live in Deschutes County. I am actually a water rights patron. And one of the things that I do is I follow land use applications that the community development gets and circulates within the community. And what's become apparent to me is we're getting a lot of buildings built on top of where there is irrigated ag, water rights. We're getting buildings and ponds and all kinds of stuff built on top of irrigated ag. And I think we could improve our land use application forms by having a box or two that's checked for the applicant when they submit their land use application as to whether or not the property has water rights. That could be groundwater rights, It could be agricultural water rights, whatever the type of water rights. And that it's up to the applicant who has water rights on their property to bring to the planning department's attention where those water rights are mapped. so that their land use application, the development that they're trying to do on the land, is shown not to be on top of where the water rights are mapped. Right now, Deschutes County staff is oblivious to all of that. they put through the checklist, the land use application, and then they go to maybe an irrigation district and ask for information. And I think that's backwards. I think we need to provide education to the landowner. I think we need to provide education to the county in their review. And I would also add that right now, the county is not notifying the Water Resources Department when, for instance, a well might be used for commercial purposes. Right now, the health department is not being asked for agency comment when a well might be used for a public event, a gathering event place, a multiple event thing on farmland. So I've given a lot of thought to this, and I encourage you to look at the land use application and think about how we go about protecting water rights so that we don't put buildings on top of them. So either we move the water right off the property, or maybe the landowner says, wow, you know, I didn't know I would be jeopardizing these water rights. Maybe I put my development on a different portion of the property. So that's just a very general comment in my 20-some years of looking at land use applications. I think it's time in these drought conditions that we as planners and developers of our community start with the information first and not a retroactive response later. Thank you. Thanks, Ms. Gould.

Are there any other public comments this evening in the room? Do we have any on Zoom? Okay. Next on the agenda will be a really exciting and informative topics. It's a water panel. And I'm going to pass it on to Nicole Mardell to introduce our guests.

Thank you, Madam Chair and Commissioners. For the record, Nicole Mardell, Principal Planner for Deschutes County Community Development. So this evening we have two presentations for you regarding the topic of water. So the Planning Commission in the past has requested panel presentations or educational opportunities to learn more about key issues related to planning. So this evening we'll learn a little bit more about water planning and management. So we'll have our first presentation from Oregon Water Resources staff, Carolyn Seffit and Jeremy Giffen. We've allocated about 30 minutes or so for their presentation. And then we'll hear from COID between about 15 and 30 minutes for their presentation as well. And then finally, we'll conclude with Q&A. Just wanted to note that compared to past years, this isn't necessarily similar in format to our panels. In the past, we had panels where there was kind of more free-form discussion on topics. This evening, these are some roadshow-style presentations that are coming to you today. So Oregon Water Resources Department, for instance, also presented to the Board of County Commissioners early last week as well. So it'll give you kind of an update on the water year. And then CUID will give you an update on their operations and some of their piping projects. I wanted to note that we did get some questions and preferred discussion topics from Commissioner Cyrus, who can be here this evening. So we've included that in today's memo and let the panelists or the presenters rather know a little bit about that. But we may or may not get to all those questions because, as we know, the topic of water is very broad. We could easily spend several days discussing this topic. So with that, I'll turn it over to Jeremy and Carolyn to introduce themselves and present. And I also just wanted to note, since we have folks in the audience, that during Q&A, the Q&A is actually meant to be for the planning commission to ask questions of the presenters. So we won't be accepting questions from the audience. And with that, I'll turn it over. Thank you.

Good evening. For the record, my name is Jeremy Giffen, Deschutes Basin Watermaster for State of Oregon Water Resources Department. And the presentation will be on the screens that I'll be given. So I don't know if you guys have you. Okay. So the talk I outlined this evening will be water resources role in the basin, a little bit of Water Rights 101, water use in Central Oregon, the Water Year Outlook, which has been a very popular topic this year, groundwater trends, and then we're going to wrap up with current conservation efforts. And I'll do probably half the slideshow and then turn it over to my co-worker Carolyn here. So the regional role of Water Resources Department, distribution and regulation of surface water and groundwater. We've been in the basin about 100 years regulating the Deschutes River and local area streams. We curtail the water uses in the basin during times of shortage. We monitor the stream flows and reservoir content. So we basically run the river. We run 60 stream gauging stations that run 24-7, 365 throughout the basin. All that's available on the Internet. We do a basin storage report. We've been doing that in the basin here with the Watermaster since 1938, letting the districts know how much their storage accounts have, how much live flows in the river, and how much water users can expect to have for the irrigation season. We do dam safety inspections, approximately 100 of them for public safety throughout the basin. And we also do well inspections. That's in our jurisdiction. So a little bit of Water Rights 101. Those are some of the uses off to the left there. But Water in Oregon is a public-owned resource. We go under the prior appropriation doctrine, which is most people who don't know anything about water law have heard about that. You know, west of the Mississippi, it's by priority date. East of the Mississippi, it's riparian doctrine. Beneficial use without waste, one of the key components. A pertinency, meaning when you have a water right, you can't just use it anywhere. You have to use it per the water right map. And water must be used beneficially once every five years. That's the use it or lose it statute, ORS 54610. And what Nunzi alluded to earlier, we have a good relationship with the county on this. Historically, the county would send me a piece of paper saying, here's a land use action. What do you want to say on there? And I would generally put on those forms. There's water right where you're planning on putting that building. You have five years to get that removed through a transfer process, or it will be lost to forfeiture. Pre-code water rights in this basin, probably the lion's share, maybe 80% of the water rights in this basin are called adjudicated, decreed, pre-code. A lot of people use different terms. Just means that they applied the water to use, beneficial use prior to 1909 when the Water Resources Department was created. And we hear a lot in the field when we're out regulating about grandfathered water rights. So we are the official keeper of the water right record here in Bend. And if we don't have a water right on your property and you are using it, you are using it illegally. So we have a process since 1909 where you apply for the Water Resources Department with an application. After a year or so, if we find that it meets all the rules and basin plan, we'll issue a water permit, which is allowed to use the water. And then you have a couple years after that on the last page, it says to beneficially use the water and get a claim of beneficial use. And then you have a certificated water right that's appurtenant to the land. And, you know, back in the day, we'd issue a water right and it was a one pager, you know, Mr. Jones can use this much water from this creek and that's all. Today's has lots of conditions on them because we're seeing a lot of changes in the basin. So if you were to get a groundwater right today, for example, it would have conditions on there about any drawdown that you may see or any interference with neighboring wells or things like that. So we're trying to head off problems, you know, before they become problems. And the mitigation program is unique to the Deschutes Basin, so we've been not issuing groundwater rights since about 1998. And the rules were passed through in 2005. We started requiring mitigation for new groundwater uses throughout the basin. Basically, in a nutshell, I don't know if we have any slides on the mitigation program today, but basically in order to get a new use in the basin you have to retire an old out of stream use so in effect we don't have new uses in the basin outside of the exempt uses water right uses are basically bucket for bucket trade All right, exempt groundwater uses. So 15,000 gallons a day for domestic use. Hardly anyone uses that. That's a pretty generous amount. States around us don't give away that much water. Stock water, 5,000 gallons a day, commercial, industrial stock water. One of the changes, though, that you might have seen that was new legislation this last year was 3,000 gallons for small farms. Prior to that, you could not grow a crop with intent to make money without a water right under the exempt uses, and now you can. So some of the water use in Central Oregon, still the lion's share is irrigation. I believe that's 88%, pretty small for my chair here. But that number has actually been going down over the years. We've been doing a lot of transfers throughout the basin. As irrigation districts become more efficient, we're moving that water back in stream. When I started as the water master here approximately 30 years ago, The Deschutes River here going through Bend had zero protected flow below Bend on its way to Redmond. Today in the summer, that's approximately 143 CFS of senior protected flow. So we've made great strides in this basin. Golf courses, especially in times of drought, seem to be a pretty common topic. We have about 14 at the time that I made this slide. Groundwater is the primary irrigation. We have four that use surface water rights. Some are supplied by the irrigation district. Some of them are even supplied by reclaimed water. So they'll take the the city water and spread it on the golf course. I can think of Meadow Lakes out in Prineville is a good example. Pronghorn was a good example as well. This is called the teacup diagram. This is what a lot of people look at. And if you want to see it on the internet, do a Google search on BOR teacup or Deschutes teacup. It'll come up and shows you kind of you know, not all our gauges, but probably a third of them, and really gives you a good view of what's going on in the river. Something that's a little unique about this year is, if you may look at this, if you've seen it in the past, Wickiup and Crane Prairie reservoirs look a little bit healthier than they have in the past. It's kind of showing a little rosier picture than what's really out there this year. We are in drought conditions, but we are holding water in Wickiup Reservoir for the Oregon Spotted Frog for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. So there's a large chunk of water in that reservoir that's intended to be released to help the Spotted Frog in the upper basin. Snowpack, this is the number that really concerns me here. 32% of normal for this time of year. That's a lot of ground we're not going to be able to make up. Historically, statistically, the peak of the Cascades peaks about April 1st on their snowpack. So we have a little bit of time before it peaks, but I don't know if you've seen the forecast next week. I think I saw 77 somewhere in there. So I don't think we're going to be adding too much to that. So Basically, the takeaway is what we have is what we're going to have to deal with for the upcoming summer supplies. Last year, we were in great shape. When I was giving this presentation around town, we were well above average, and we seem to be ground zero for the best supplies. storm track. We were the highest numbers and people to north and people in the south were not doing as well. But this year, as you see on the maps, we're actually the worst location to be in the state with the smallest numbers. Overall water year precipitation, 82% for the Deschutes. We had a pretty bad drought in 2014 and 15, and the snowpack, or maybe it was 2015, 16, the snowpack was as low as it is today. However, the overall precip was sitting up at 100%. Yeah, we had a bad snowpack. It was a bad year for Mount Batchelor, but we had a lot of precipitation, so that kind of made up for it. What concerns me this year is both numbers are low. And so with the overall precipitation, meaning the rain and the snow when you put those together, is actually pretty low. So we're expecting curtailments this year. Here's the snowpack for the upper Deschutes, not the whole Deschutes, but just the upper Deschutes. And you can see the black line there actually goes down below the red line. That means we were in record-breaking territory. So our snowpack was that low this year. For the upper basin, we're sitting about 28% of average. And here we are for precipitation again in the upper basin, you know, better than the snowpack, but still not where we want to be, you know, being more than 20% below where we're supposed to be for the water year. And, you know, to be honest, most of our precipitation for the water year should be here by April. And so we have very little time to make up these numbers. This is temperatures in the upper Deschutes Basin. The green line in the center is the average. So most of those lines, even again, bumping up into wrecked territory, but we're finding we're much warmer than normal. So that means that any snowpack we do have at that mid-low elevation has kind of been melting off early, which is not good news. So here's the prediction going forward. Again, we're going to probably be right around 30% of normal for the year. Again, not a stellar location to be. The reservoirs are looking better than they have over the last three or four years. So if there's a silver lining anywhere, I would say that's probably where it's at. This is one of the snow-till sites that we use. So again, you know us water nerds at Water Resources like to talk about snowpack and precipitation, and we really like to drill, you know, once that melts and goes down in the aquifer, then we have our water budget coming up for the following year. From this graph right here, I think we have, what, 45 years worth of data here. I can't quite read the x-axis, but we have zero snow up at the Three Creeks Meadows snow-till site. That's going to be rough on the White Juice Creek area and the Three Sisters Irrigation District. And it looks much the same for the Tumalo Irrigation District here locally. A lot of different graphs here. What I'm trying to show is if you start at that bottom graph with the snowpack indicator, that shows us where our snowpack is. And we use, you know, again, these snow tail sites run by NRCS. So our snowpack, again, dropping way down there. Generally, when the snowpack melts off here in the next two, three months, we're going to see the aquifer close to the Cascades respond to that additional snow and rain going back into the aquifer. So we'll see a little bump there. I don't think we're getting much of a bump this year. So when you see the aquifer indicator, it's a direct result of the snowpack melting. A couple months after that, the aquifer comes up. Then the springs start reacting to the aquifer. Springs are just basically outlets to the groundwater system. So if you bring up the groundwater system, those springs will start delivering more water. I have a couple gauges up there. I have Fall River. They're in the South County and Deschutes below Snow Creek, which is a gauge on the Deschutes River before the Deschutes has been touched. It's basically where it goes into Crane Prairie Reservoir. So it's easy to forecast what's going to happen at these gauges because the snow melts, it goes into the ground. About August 18th, we're going to see the Deschutes River peak as it goes into Crane Prairie Reservoir. It's extremely predictable on how fast it goes into the aquifer and comes up there. However, the amount is going to be drastically different than it was last year. All these area springs that come out of the aquifer are going to be substantially lower this year. That means the Deschutes River natural flow is going to be substantially lower, which is bad news for all the water users along area streams and rivers, especially the irrigation districts here in Central Oregon. On a good water year, they can survive off the natural flow of the Deschutes River, and we don't have to pull much out of Wickiup, Crane Prairie, or Crescent Lake this year. This is going to be different. I think the natural flow is going to be low, so we're going to be pulling heavily off of those reservoirs right off the bat. One of the key things that I'm trying to show around town this spring with the drought conditions is the difference that it makes to the natural flow when the Little Deschutes comes in. Because the Little Deschutes River is a very large contributor to the Deschutes River. However, it's a little different. It's not as much spring-fed. It has more of a runoff signature. So on the Deschutes River, if it rains... uh you know two inches a big storm in central oregon overnight the deschutes river really doesn't move at all it just sits there nice and stable the little deschutes river will react and we do have floods that come off of there so what i'm trying to depict in this graft is we have a during a wet year we can have an extra hundred thousand acre feet of water that's half of wickiup reservoir when it's at capacity that's a lot of water that comes down the little shoots drainage I'm showing wet years up there, medium years, and dry years. And so we're expecting a dry year that rivals the driest up there. So about 27,000 acre feet, plus or minus, coming out of that drainage, instead of 100,000 acre feet. So that's going to make a big difference. Instead of... supplying water from the Little Deschutes to the districts here in town. It's going to be different this year. The Little Deschutes is going to put out very little water. We're going to have to add the additional water out of the upper basin reservoirs. This is a graph that, again, shows one particular snow tail site, and this is my predecessor, Aubrey Perry, the Deschutes Watermaster from 1933 to 1960, passed down a kind of rule of thumb, and that was if you get 30 inches of water in the snowpack at Cascade Summit snow tail site by April 1st, you're going to have an okay water year. From this graph, you can see that we're less than 10 inches, so less than a third of what we need to have a good water year. So that definitely threw up a red flag. You can see the last 25 years up there, and you can see sometimes we get up to 50 or 40. But for the most part, about half the years, maybe a little better, we reach 30. That's definitely not going to be the year. This is the drought monitor. A lot of people are familiar with this. This gets put out once a week. That yellow abnormally dry has been creeping down towards our basin for the last five or six reports. And now we're starting to see, you know, some of the more serious colors in there. So a lot of people were questioning, you know, if we're just abnormally dry, why are we declaring drought? Well... This basin is a little bit different. We know what's coming. We've seen the snowpack. It's going to melt in the aquifer. The rivers are going to go down. We're going to be in drought conditions fairly quickly here. Looking forward, next 8 to 14 days, again, not good news for what we're after at the Water Master's office. We're going to be above average, well above average in temperature. And when it comes to the precipitation outlook, average to drier than average. So again, a lot of ground to make up before April 1st. We're going to start ramping up the outflow out of Wickiup Reservoir on March 25th.

And I imagine by the 1st of April, we'll be pulling Wickiup Reservoir down.

A lot of the irrigation districts are planning on turning on around the first week of April. That's a little bit earlier than normal, but I don't blame them given the dry conditions that are out there. And I'm going to pass the rest of this on to Carolyn.

Good evening. My name is Carolyn Suffit. I'm the Central Region Manager for Water Resources Department for our Bend office. I'm going to go ahead and continue the depressing news that Jeremy has started us off with and talk about groundwater trends. I don't think there are any surprises here about what our groundwater is doing, but to highlight this graph, it's over 10 years old, but about the same picture. There's probably some changes that could be updated, but primarily our groundwater is influenced by climate and that our groundwater decreases our influence by the climate. And then next up is pumping and then canal lining. So obviously we've done a lot of lining projects in the past 10 years, 15 years. So that number is probably a little bit more than what this graph shows. Um, this is a picture to kind of give a visual of what we're seeing at ob's wells around the area. Um, so you can see that green dot over in the sisters area, closer to the cafes. We generally see pretty decent recharge along everything. That's kind of closer to the crest of the mountains, but as you get further east into the basin, um, things really start to take a dive, um, particularly around the Redmond area. Um, so this graph kind of shows that in a different format, um, with, you know, the more healthy looking groundwater levels kind of around the sisters Cloverdale area, closer to the crest of the mountains. And as you get kind of further east, um, over into, you know, climb view area, Redmond, you really see those, um, groundwater declines going down. Um, And we haven't seen any sort of turnaround in those really with the past couple of years that were decent water years. And again, the concern really being getting into this Redmond to Horse Ridge area where we're just seeing some pretty substantial declines. And if you may recall in 2024, I think it was September, we adopted our new groundwater allocation rules. So this is a statewide effort to look at groundwater levels and determine what is substantially declined. and what's reasonably stable. So, this is all driven from some of the issues that came around in the Harney area. We're trying to get ahead of areas being designated as critical groundwater areas where we have to really stop groundwater use and catch things before they get that bad. One of the challenges in this area is the influence of the canal. So one of the projects that our region is working on is a study to determine how much the canals influence what our Our groundwater levels were because it's really hard to say you know before those canals went in what the actual metric is so we are hoping to get that work completed the spring. Our hydro geologists are hard at work on that, so we can start having a good baseline to work from and then we'll know how to really move forward with these new rules. On the more good news side of things, we can talk about some of the conservation efforts and you can really see where those have been effective in this region. So I'm going to go through a couple that have been in use here for quite a few years and then some of our newer efforts that are happening in the basin. So one of our most successful conservation efforts that's happened here is our in-stream leasing program. So this is where, you know, patrons within districts can lease their water in-stream if they're not using it. Started in the late 1990s and really took off. And now it's kind of just leveled out and stayed stable. Obviously, there's some limitations to how much that program can be used when you have to get, when you're using old infrastructure. So we don't have pressurized systems in a lot of these canals and they really depend on a certain amount of water going down them. So it's kind of leveled off, but it stays, remains really consistent. And also drought years can also affect it. So you can see where it kind of leveled off in the late 2010s area when we had a lot of dry years. Another really successful program in this area is the allocation of conserved water. So this is where people have used grant funding to do water conservation efforts and put water permanently in stream. One of the um differences in this area that you don't see in other parts of the state is that this program often has percentages of water that are put in stream while a percentage may still go into use in this basin the public funding went to put a hundred percent of that water in stream so all of the canal projects lining projects where we're getting conservation of that water um up until the HCP, all that water went in stream permanently and it was used to boost flows in the middle of the chutes in the summer. So districts would do a piping project, for example, the savings accrued from that piping project would then go in stream in the summer when it would normally be used. So that was a big reason why we saw a lot of restoration of the Middle Deschutes and also Tumalo and White Shoes Creek. So that was a lot of allocation of conserved water programs. The graph there shows how much that program was used here versus elsewhere in the state. And that graphic was in up to 2025. So you can see, you know, it's just widely used in this program, super successful and did a lot of great work. One of the newer programs that you guys might not be fully familiar with is our Deschutes Basin Alternative Pathway. So as the HCP got implemented to provide You guys are, I assume, familiar with HCP for the spotted frog. We realized we couldn't use the allocation of conserved water program or that that wouldn't help the efforts of the HCP to be putting water in stream in the summer when we were, the goal there is to get water in stream in the winter months. So because the allocation of conserved water program wasn't set up for that mechanism, we have spent the past two, three years developing the alternative pathway. We are nearing the finish line. It's been a long process and really hard work. to get everything going for this. But the intent of this program is that while we are continuing to do these canal piping projects, instead of the water savings going into the middle Deschutes in the summer, it's getting passed to North Unit Irrigation District as live flow. And in return, North Unit is releasing that water out of Wickiup in the winter. So we're trying to kind of restore the balance of the whole project. habitat there and meet the needs of the habitat conservation program. So basically since 2018, I think most of the projects have been slated to go through this pathway. We just have been having to catch up with the mechanisms, the legal mechanisms to make this happen. So we're close. We're almost there. Hopefully we can kind of put a stamp on it this year and get those projects permanently through this pathway. And then finally, one of our programs that has not quite gotten going yet, but we've gotten at least the legislative side of it completed is the Deschutes Water Bank. So this will use the same sort of mechanisms of the other conservation programs, but set up a water bank that would be run by the DRC. Two kind of principles with this, which is, um, pooled fallowed acres and split rate and split duty. Um, I, for the sake of time, I won't get into too much detail with this, but, um, it has a similar, um, structured a little bit to the, um, to the alternative alternative pathway. Um, but now we would have a water bank established, which is, um, I think the first of our state, um, and kind of going off principles that we picked up from other states who have done similar things. As I said, that one's not quite off the ground yet. We've gotten the legislation through. We still have a lot of approvals to go through with the tribes, Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, and also getting the charter approved by the Water Resources Commission. And that concludes my portion.

Thank you very much. This is very, although not very informative, depressing, but informative. Do we want to ask some questions of these panelists or hear the next panelists and then ask, Nicole, how did you envision that?

Very good question, Commissioner. I would say if you had any burning questions that you want answered right now, we could go ahead and ask those. Otherwise, I think John Skidmore with Central Oregon Irrigation District will also be providing a presentation. So if you wanted to hold off and wait, you could ask them later as well. So up to the Planning Commission.

Thank you. I have two questions. So, Jeremy, in the beginning, you mentioned that there are well inspections. How often do you do well inspections?

So the well inspections happen when a new well is going to be drilled. It's a requirement by state law to turn in what's called a start card. And when that start card comes in, it kind of says the driller is planning on drilling over here in the next 30 days. So that spurs our well inspectors in our local office to go out and watch the drilling of it and to make sure that it's sealed properly, cased properly, and the rest of that. So it's really, they don't run around our well inspectors looking at current wells that are out there. We try and catch them during the building phase to make sure that it's done correctly.

Okay. I was confused about that. And then my other question is, you had mentioned loss to forfeiture. What happens to that water if there's a loss?

Does it go in stream? Anyone, it just goes back into the pot of water, so it's lost forever.

But you don't resell it. It just goes back in stream?

That's right. That's right. That's the whole thing about Oregon water laws. If you're not using that water, it gets passed on to the next user. A lot of people think that use it or lose it is automatic. It's not, though. So if there's an accusation, it leads to a hearing, and then at the end of the administrative hearing, we choose whether – well, the judge will choose whether the water right is lost or not. And I've been on a number of those over the last 30 years, and the burden of proof to take a water right is very high. So – Generally, unless the water user is willing to get rid of that water right, it's generally pretty hard to take that water right away. It used to be a lot more popular back in the day, but with the litigious nature of the world today, we really don't do a lot of cancellations.

So is that just for groundwater then, and then the irrigation districts would have their own cancellations?

It's all water. Yeah. So anything covered by a water right, not the exempt uses, but the actual water rights, which include irrigation districts and groundwater rights on private land. Any of those that have not been beneficially used for five consecutive years can be lost. The irrigation districts have made great strides in this over the years where they actually even have, and John can talk to this in if he wants to, but beneficial use coordinators within the districts, because that's key to them. They do not want to lose a chunk of that very expensive water, right? So they will actually send letters out to the patrons saying, you know, you haven't used it in two years. The water match there could be watching. And, and by the fourth year going into the fifth year, the districts can actually confiscate that water and put it to a beneficial use to save it.

Okay. Thank you. See, on Zoom, Commissioner Williams has a question.

Yes, and just first off, wanted to say, Jeremy and Carolyn, really excellent graphics that you showed. The different, like the snowpack, the precipitation, the average, the temperatures, really appreciated seeing that. And I don't know if this is so much a question as a comment. Having read the packet, it seems I thought that Redmond area felt comfortable with its amount of water and its amount of recharge. And this may be old information from the 2018 water panels we had, and maybe it has changed that much since 2018. I represent the South County, and I've lived here 26 years. And in the first 20 or so, my neighborhood of 100 properties never had a well run dry. And we've had 20 wells run dry in the last five years. But I did not see any information about the drawdowns and the recharges for the South County. Is that information tracked?

Yeah, we have a hydrogeologist in our Bend office named Joe Kemper, and I did talk to him recently because of the low snowpack in the South County area and the shallow, normally shallow groundwater aquifer down there and corresponding shallow wells. We're expecting a bigger problem this summer because of the lack of precipitation down there. So a lot of those wells are You know, when they drill them, they'll go down, they'll hit water, and they'll only go a couple feet. Well, we have a constantly declining groundwater table here. As a rule of thumb, to the west of the Deschutes River, generally zero to six inches drop per year. However, to the east, about a foot per year. The Redmond area on that graph that... map that Carolyn showed really showed some big declines there. And those hydrographs show that it's on a one-way path. But I think it'll be interesting to see the upper basin this year because the snowpack and precipitation was so bad up there. I think that we're going to get a lot more deepenings. We do have a graph we've been given on other shows recently that shows the number of deepenings that have been applied for, and it has gone through the roof here recently. So this is a a pretty big problem throughout the basin.

If that graph or map could be shared with Nicole to disseminate to us, that would be really interesting to see. Thank you.

Any other questions, Nathan?

No, I got a few. Thank you for the presentation. I saw from the maps that you monitor, obviously, reservoir levels, stream flows. You got those monitoring sites that you presented. How well are withdrawals measured or monitored in terms of water permit and use of the water?

Well, it depends what we're talking about. Surface water out of the Deschutes River, we manage that to the drop. I mean, we really do. I have stream gauging stations all the way down from Wickiup. All the canals are monitored by the Water Resources Department. And every two weeks throughout the summer, I do a storage report and I tell each district exactly how much they've used, what their legal right is. And when they exceed that, we take it out of their storage account in the upper basin.

At the district level, though.

At the district level. But the Deschutes is unique in that it's not like normal streams where you can go out with a shovel and make a ditch. We don't have a lot of diversions out of the Deschutes. It's very unique. They're big diversions because they had to blast through all the rock to get it out of there. We do monitor... um in the upper basin some private ditches and thing and water uses uh because we regulate again by that priority system that we showed and so starting at the beginning of the season an irrigation district will make a call to me and say i'm not getting all of my 1913 priority water for north unit example so we'll march around through the upper basin on the little deschutes crescent creek and all those tributaries making sure everyone's off with a junior priority date um when it comes to groundwater uh we do have triggers in these permits so if there's certain declines uh that they can be regulated off for those declines in the groundwater table we have a lot of groundwater uses throughout the basin and we we require them most of them to report to us and that goes into a database we haven't had a lot of staff for that position so that is an area that we don't monitor as much as we should so in other words some of those conditions could have already passed their decline condition and they're still running the other thing that makes it tough in the deschutes basin is we have an unconfined aquifer So when you punch down and you hit the general aquifer, there's all kinds of water, and you're usually limited by your pump size. Whereas another basin, if you were pumping your well, there would be a cone of depression where you're taking water out, and it would affect your neighbor's well. That's not so much the case in the Deschutes Basin, so that leads to lack of regulation just because it's very hard to prove that my well is injuring your well. That's groundwater. In the groundwater.

But surface water, individual permittee, I mean, is that monitored that they're, how much they're actually taking out?

Yes, yes. I can't think of... hardly any diversions off of the Deschutes that don't have some kind of measuring device on them, as well as, uh, streams, White Juice Creek, Tumlo Creek, um, out into the Crooked River. I know that's not Deschutes County, but, um, yeah, we've really worked to put measuring devices on these, uh, different systems. And, and again, our Deschutes storage port that's been in place for almost a hundred years, if there's water missing in the report, um, It usually is gauges off, but we monitor so close that if somebody was taking substantial water, we would know about it.

And then, if I may. Yes, please. I want to be respectful with time and the other panelists and so forth. But I guess I'm still a little bit confused in use it or lose it. And then the flexibility, though, that maybe for in-stream use, temporary transfers versus permanent transfers. If I'm a landowner and a small landowner in Eastern Deschutes County and I have a water use permit, attached to that land, but I don't want to use it, you said five years, but if I lease it with this relatively new program for in-stream use, does that reset that five-year clock or does it have to, I mean, I guess this gets to the definition of beneficial use, but I'm a little bit confused about the strictures of the use it or lose it versus the flexibility of temporary or permanent transfers for in-stream flow. Can you clarify that?

Yeah, exactly. So permanent transfer would just go in and it'd be a new certificate. We have a very robust leasing program. I think the best on the whole West Coast and the amount that we lease in the Deschutes Basin here. So if you are a water right holder, that water right subject to transfer meeting certificated, not permitted, you can apply to us. And we do upwards of nearly a thousand parcels every summer we put in stream through that temporary leasing program. Um, so if you put it in stream for a period of one to five years, as soon as that's gone in stream protected by the water master, uh, as a beneficial use in stream, that's beneficial use on the water, right? So that is great protection. And a lot of people utilize that program. We never thought it would be so successful here, but we have more people applying than we let go through that program. But it's a great way because then there's a paper trail. You have an order that says, this went in stream, there's your beneficial use. So if we go to court over forfeiture, you just pull up that leasing piece of paper and you're good. The leasing is just one of the tools in the toolbox. We also have temporary transfers. So if you're not using your water on that land, you do a temporary transfer for a period of one to five years again.

To a neighbor or something?

To a neighbor. Yeah, usually close proximity. And they beneficially use it. Then that gets you out of forfeiture as well. I encourage you to look at ORS 54610. That's the use it or lose it statute. And there's a whole list of rebuttals in there from one or A all the way down to like... P or Q now, there's so many. So there's a lot of, if, for example, if you haven't used your water, but you are ready to use it, but because of a drought like this summer, you weren't able to use it, that's a rebuttal against forfeiture. So again, that all points to, it's very difficult to take away a water right with so many avenues that are out there. The leasing program has been tremendous in this basin though. It's really one of our best tools for putting water back in stream, as well as staying away from forfeiture on water rights.

Great answer. Thank you. And very encouraging if I can. One last one. One last one. Also, along those lines, I guess I'm a little bit confused, always have been, about how a large proposed rural development, a destination resort can, given the appurtenance, the attachment of water permits to pieces of land, how they Collect, essentially, my understanding, I don't know, water rights and pool them so that they can go forward or attempt to go forward with a destination resort. It's probably a big topic, but how does that work?

Generally, the destination resorts will apply for a different kind of water right. Much like a city, they usually apply for a quasi-municipal water right, which they apply and they have a service boundary, a certain area where all the uses are allowed. You can store water, you can run a golf course, you can use domestic water, all those things under that water right. However, again, back to the CHOOTS mitigation program, they have to mitigate for the consumptive use of the water they're going to use, which can be very expensive in this basin. So it's been a, when the legislation was approved for the mitigation program back in 2005, they allocated 200 CFS cap. And we still haven't hit that cap, but a lot of people have utilized that program and it's been very successful. But you can't just go out and start a destination resort without having the water. You have to mitigate for the water and then go through a lengthy public process. I'm sure you guys have followed Thornburg process. They've done, even when securing water and stuff, it's still a very difficult process to get from the beginning to the end. Okay.

Thank you.

Yeah, it was like last January when University of Oregon came out with that study showing the size of the aquifer being larger than expected in central Cascades. I was just curious. It's an exciting study saying 81 cubic kilometers. Is OWRD doing any follow-up studies on that? Because that wasn't even what the purpose of the study for was. They weren't doing mapping of groundwater. But is there going to be any follow-up research just to see size and what capacity is for the aquifer up there?

I don't know. I'm unaware of any plans to do that. You know, that wasn't really surprising to me. All they were doing is kind of showing the size of that aquifer. But in terms of water usage, it's already baked into the cake. In other words, that aquifer. gets snow melt and rain in it and then it overflows and creates the metolius river fall river all these different rivers that are around so if someone were to go up punch wells in that aquifer and start mining the water out all it would do would take surface water out of various streams we're not losing that water anywhere it's what creates robust streams in Central Oregon. I mean, look, we get 10 to 12 inches of rain here. Look at the size of the rivers we have. The water budget says they shouldn't be that big. We're stealing that water from the Cascades and even onto the other side of the Cascades because of the geology. It comes over and feeds these robust rivers like the Metolius River. When you look at the volume put out by the Metolius River and the size of the drainage, it doesn't make sense. So a lot of this water is coming from that aquifer overflowing and creating these robust rivers in Central Oregon.

Thanks.

Tony, Commissioner Williams.

Just briefly, one of the slides shows the half acre of lawn For people who have more than a half acre, and especially in areas where there are wells, people kind of feel like, hey, I've got free water. I can, you know, have a big, great lawn. Who regulates if someone has over half an acre? Is it a county, state, you know, what level, you know, who do we turn them into?

Looking at him right here. That is probably, oddly enough, that's a lion's share of my complaints that I get throughout the summer. One of the best things that helped me out is Google Earth. Anyone can punch up and look. And our mapper on our department's website, I encourage you to go there. If you pull up the mapper of Oregon, if there's a water right on a green, if you see a green field and there's not some kind of shading over it indicating a water right, that's a problem. And so, again, you know, we at the Watermaster's office will go back and forth through Google Maps and check those things. But we do several regulations each year on people exceeding that half acre. And there's a lot of people that turn in complaints, and rightly so. If you're a new person moving to Central Oregon and you want a water right, and you go through the mitigation process, which can be $5,000 to $10,000 an acre to buy for the mitigation for your field, you're not going to be happy if your neighbor is taking that water for free. So we're a complaint-driven system. Most of our complaints come in from neighbors. family members even. So we do get a lot of complaints on the half acre. That's something we take seriously and we investigate, you know, every summer.

Alrighty. I'll make sure your email is distributed.

I have a question relating to that. If you had a crystal ball, would you ever see a time where we did actually regulate wells for that, you know, 15,000 gallons a day?

Well, that's interesting. Oregon is very generous on what they give on the exemptions at 15,000 gallons a day. Most of these households are using 500 gallons a day with the ability to do that.

We have a lot of subdivisions that are

15, 20 homes that throw up a red flag, wow, you run into the exemption without a water right, we put a flow meter on. And when they don't, when they aren't doing the landscaping, they generally can stay, you know, within the limits. So if I had a crystal ball, I think I um i would think someone makes a run at that 15 000 gallons per day someday because that's a very generous offering especially with the declines we're seeing here in central oregon did that

Yeah. Yeah. And I think what I've seen too is people, it's when you, when you irrigate your lawn off of a well water, you don't have to worry about your sprinklers clogging and some of the cumbersome parts of what happens when you irrigate off of, you know, surface water. And so I've seen a lot of systems hooked up to well, you know, landscaping systems because it's, you know, a an easier way to water your lawn and such. Yeah. And that is, and so, and that's what I kind of get a little like, it is the intention.

Yeah. It's just very attractive when it's basically free water with the exception of the electricity to get out of the hole to irrigate more. And so we really, I have a steel tape. I go and measure lawns all the time and let people know, you know, flowers from here over need to be pulled out or, whatever. Yeah, it's something we're on. And it's, you know, most of our complaints.

Well, thank you for doing that.

Any other questions or shall we? Yes, I'm sorry. I have another question about population growth. And I'm sure that that's something that probably everyone would be concerned about. You know, there's a lot of development and agricultural land is being turned into development. And I'm wondering where does that water come from? You know, if there's no new, there's no new water, right? I mean, we have X amount of water. And if there's more building, is that, do cities already have within their own water rights, like a surplus that they're just drawing from for population growth for new developments or where does it come from?

Yeah, that's a great question. The city of Bend, for example, saw that the exploding population was going to be a problem for their water rights situation, they instituted a very aggressive conservation program. And I encourage you to talk to the city on that. It's amazing how through the explosion of growth, the water use remained basically flat. A lot of that was, you know, many years ago, they didn't have meters on a lot of people. If you don't have a meter, you're going to run that water probably a lot more. So they made sure that everyone had a meter and they did a very aggressive campaign for saving water. They've done a tremendous job. They are worried about future growth. So they are worried about the inability to get future water rights and permits. Again, the mitigation program is still the driver in that. So a lot of people with surface water rights, because the price went up so high, have transferred their water in-stream as an in-stream water right we talked about before and our department will issue credits to take water out of the ground so we got rid of this use we're going to give you a new use those are sellable credits and so that's what going forward in the future the cities are going to have to rely on retired surface water rights put in back in stream in perpetuity and protected by the water master for these credits for new groundwater uses The price of those groundwater credits have gone up tremendously since we started the program because nobody's exempt from that program. Facebook, Apple, City of Bend, everyone's playing in the same court. And that is you have to get those credits before we'll give you new groundwater uses. A lot of the cities in Central Oregon had a pretty good... number of water rights that were not perfected yet, not built into yet. And so they've been riding off of that for quite a while, but eventually they're going to have to go back and get those credits to move forward.

Okay. Thank you for your presentation. And may I request that when this study that's going to be completed this spring about the canal effect on recharge, if you don't mind passing it along to us, I think that would be super. It's a highly debatable, you know, hot topic that I'd love to see. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much again for joining us and presenting, Caroline and Jeremy. And now we have John Skidmore with Central Oregon Irrigation District.

Thank you. Again, John Skidmore, Central Oregon Irrigation District, where that was a very... quantitative presentation. Mine's probably going to be more on the qualitative side of things by more social science than hard science. But I do have a coworker here with me, Michaela Watson. Michaela is one of our water rights gurus, but also works very closely with our patrons with beneficial use, trying to avoid forfeiture, those types of things. So She works with patrons all the time, helping them figure out how to do the in-stream leasing, how to move water around their properties. My background is really more land use planning. I was a planner for the county 100 years ago, and I thought land use policy and land use law was complex, and now I'm really learning about water policy and water law and They're both equally complex, frustrating, archaic, antiquated, but all variant. What I will do with my presentation, I'll give a brief history of Central Oregon Irrigation District and talk about the basin a bit in general. And then I will highlight the Habitat Conservation Plan as well as the COID's plans for the Pilot Butte Modernization Project, which is the piping of the Pilot Butte Canal. If you have nothing going on on St. Patrick's Day at the Redmond Senior Center, we will be holding our required public meeting for the environmental impact statement, which is really the federal permitting process for us to construct the remaining 18 and a half miles of the of the Pilot Butte Canal. So it's going to be 78 degrees supposedly on Tuesday. So you might be able to find a better place to spend your St. Patrick's Day than the Senior Center. But if you can't, we'll be up there. Generally, just about what I've seen in the basin, and Jeremy and Carolyn mentioned it, there are these eight irrigation districts. And what I've seen is a collective understanding of the need for additional stewardship of water, working together, working with the various stakeholders to figure out where this precious resource needs to be, how to try to be able to move it around a bit more efficiently. I think, you know, Jeremy mentioned in the last 20 years, but we have 143 CFS below bandwidth 20 years ago that didn't exist. And that really is a result of all of these various stakeholders. We do collaborative working groups and collaborative plans. Collaboration is hard. A lot of hard conversations, tough conversations, but I think a hallmark of this basin is its ability to work together. We still have irrigation happening for agriculture. We still have cities growing with the water they need. We have more water in the river. And you don't see that in every basin. You know, the Klamath Basin, some basins in the Colorado are just entrenched in litigation. And I find it pretty impressive that we've been able to avoid that. And I think it speaks highly to the area. It speaks highly to the various stakeholders that are involved in the conversation. So... with that i'm going to hop in i'll provide a little bit of a background on central oregon irrigation district itself all the irrigation districts Most of us predate the county. Most of us predate the city of Bend, the railroad. Central Oregon really wouldn't be here if it weren't for these irrigation districts setting up, bringing in agricultural interest, bringing in the timber. Without the water to create industry, really, we wouldn't have seen the growth that we've seen over the past 100 plus years. And I will highlight some of that moving forward, I assume. There we go. So COID has been around since about 1900. The gentleman on the left up here is Alexander Drake. You might have heard of Alexander Drake from Drake Park fame. He created the Pilot Butte Development Company. And the Pilot Butte Development Company built a mill where Drake Park is, platted the first few lots in the city of Bend. And Alexander Drake also started... became central oregon irrigation district uh the picture in the middle if you've hiked along the trails off of brookswood you can follow it all the way down our our um our ditch rider road that's the first version that was constructed it's still in the same place um that diversion served both of our canals and i'll get into a little bit of that later but that's still in place Mr. Drake was an interesting character. He created this district, developed a lot of property, had a wood mill, and then somewhere in the 1910, 1912s, he just kind of disappears from Central Oregon and lands in a palatial estate somewhere near Pasadena, California. And I think he probably embodies the whole whiskeys for drinking, waters for fighting moniker, where He made filings with the state to create this district, but there was a CC Hutchinson, who apparently was ahead of him in line, who had filed for these rights in 1898. Who knows what happens? Somehow, Mr. Drake came out on top and created the district. In 1902, he contracted with the state to reclaim roughly 84,000 acres. And Jeremy had mentioned the reclamation states of the West. The federal government invested a lot of time and effort and created bills to help reclaim these wastelands, the deserts, the forests. And you have federal acts such as... The General Mining Law of 1866, Desert Act of 1877, Forest Reserve Act of 1891. And these acts all kind of work together to allow folks like Alexander to create the districts, to create the canals, to divert from the rivers, to protect these canals with easements and such, and be able to operate them for the purposes they were intended. So in this case here, for agriculture. What's... A lot of times the planners will hear about this Cary Act that came a little bit later. The Cary Act was, I think, approved by the feds in 1894. And really what that did is it allowed these federally provided easements licenses, properties to operate these facilities. It really was a roadmap to get from federal ownership to state and from state to these individual entities. So Mr. Drake was paying attention when Oregon adopted its version, I believe in 1902 of the Cary Act that allowed these private companies to actually own these facilities, operate the easements and really get up and running. In 1900, so he was ahead of the curve, he hired an engineer who went out and did the initial surveying and really identified the two canals that we still operate. And he filed for approvals for our two canals, one in November of 1901, one in July of 1901. But the work was pretty slow going. By 1904, there was only 40 acres that was irrigated. But if you think about it, these districts beat the railroad. So the closest railroad depot was Shanico. So trying to get things like dynamite and the other things that you need to create these canals here was pretty tough work. That was the point of diversion for both of COID's canals up until 1912. In 1912, John Steidle and some others. And I still haven't figured out exactly why, but they constructed the North Canal Dam just on the north side of town. So if you're driving up on Northeast Division, there's the dam there. I don't know how much work's been done to it since 1912. And what's interesting is it's owned by the Steidle Dam Company, of which the folks that own the River House are a part of. And so that canal is where We now have the diversion for the Pilot Butte Canal, which goes up to Terrebonne and through Redmond, North Unit, which is up in Jefferson County, and then Swally. And it's interesting that three districts are so tied to that canal and they don't own it. And so we work with the state to get it inspected every year. And we try to work with the owners to do the improvements that are needed to make sure that it continues to do what it does. So. One other item that's of interest with... coid and really more pilot butte development company in the city of bend um the first president after um mr drake was goodwillie who was the first mayor of bend and the first city council meetings that the city of band held were in the pilot butte canal or pilot butte development companies offices so very close coordination and uh the first Patron in Redmond was John Redmond. So just an interesting, very close relationship with Central Oregon. And just some general facts about the district. It's roughly 45,000 acres in size. We've got about 3,500 patrons. The two canals are, and I'll show them to you. We have the Pilot Butte Canal, which runs from Northeast Division north up through Terrebonne. We have the Central Oregon Canal, which runs, if you're driving out along Reed Market Road, it's on your right, heads out to Alfalfa and then up to Powell Butte. That's where you see a lot more of the ranch-style agricultural uses. Although closer in, we are seeing a lot of farm-to-table organic, those types of smaller acreage farms. Same with the Pilot Butte. canal. We have two hydroelectric facilities, one on the Central Oregon Canal, which is on the Brookswood property. You could have hiked there for years and years and not known that that exists. But we have a run of the river hydroelectric facility there. And then we have a hydroelectric facility on the Pilot Butte Canal in Juniper Ridge. So if you're heading up to Redmond on the right side, there's a a brick building there, that's our hydroelectric facility. On the left side of the road, that is Swalley's hydroelectric facility. We have three historic districts, one on the Central Oregon Canal, and then two on the Pilot Butte Canal. And as we work through our environmental impact statement, that took a lot of our time working out how to work through those historic districts, how to mitigate for the resources, which I'll explain a little bit further as well. And then, We are in the midst of our EOS, our environmental impact statement process. Again, we have 18 and a half acres to 18 and a half miles to pipe. We've had about seven miles of the Pilot Butte Canal piped. Some of it was for the Juniper Ridge hydroelectric facility. And then we did about five-ish miles up in Terrebonne through an environmental assessment process. The environmental assessment process is also a federal environmental permitting process. It just has a value which you can't exceed in terms of the improvement. So I think it's a $25 million cap. So for the rest of the 18 and a half miles, it was going to exceed that $25 million. So we did the entire EIS versus kind of a more truncated environmental assessment. Here's our mission statement. And to me, you know, what I'm seeing collectively amongst the districts is really the understanding of, you know, the need to be efficient providers of a very, you know, important resource, understanding the environmental impacts, the environmental responsibilities. You know, you still have old habits die hard. Water rights are pretty strongly held, but what I've seen is these boards understanding the regional needs and how they can play a part in providing water where water needs to be when it needs to be. I also think we're seeing a change in the type of farming that we're seeing throughout Central Oregon. The North Unit, the commodity scale farming, the carrot seed that they do, That's going to continue to operate the way it does. But what we're seeing in some of the districts closer to Bend, you're seeing some smaller acreage, high value farming going on. Most of the farmers markets and CSAs, that produce is coming from Swally, Tumalo, Central Oregon Irrigation District. It's not coming from the commodity scale farmers up in Jefferson County. And they're both very, very important. But I think we're starting to see more market interest in locally sourced foods. CSA's friend of a friend is in Swally. She obtained five acres. It had water on it. She knew nothing about it. She was irrigating turf for a while. She's like, you know, I should really do something else with this. now contracts with a family that does a CSA and half of that. And so our district manager kind of has a story of, you know, what once was maybe, you know, two goats in a Prius. Now you're seeing greenhouses and you're seeing aquaponics and those types of things. And so to me, that's kind of the exciting part. I've started to reach out to like the, I think it's High Desert Farm and Food Alliance and these types of, and so connecting with those folks and getting a better understanding of what's changing in terms of how our water is used is pretty important. So that's been a pretty fun part of my job. But what are we gearing up for really stems from this habitat conservation plan with the threatened species of bull trout, steelhead, Oregon spotted frog. The various districts are working together to allow North Unit to really help improve the habitat. at U.S. Fish and Wildlife's direction when it needs, when more water needs to be in different places or where less water needs to be there. That's what North Unit is doing. And then we are working with North Unit as our other districts, but I think it's a pretty eloquent plan where the water that will be conserved through this piping is then used to backfill the north unit irrigation districts water. And so that type of cooperation between districts, again, I don't think it's absolutely unique to the Deschutes Basin, but it's relatively rare, where you have senior water rights holders working with the junior water rights holders to help improve the reliability of their So to dive a little bit more into the Pilot Butte Modernization Project, there's the 18 and a half miles of the Pilot Butte Canal from Bend all the way up into Terrebonne. At this point in time, our approach is to start, hopefully, we get through this environmental impact statement, we get a record of decision, we're able to start building, we would start from the north and work our way south. We've been working at the federal level to obtain various federal grants. We had, call it 70-ish million dollars. Not necessarily earmarked, but we were pretty confident we were going to get it. been a little bit of turmoil in DC over the past year. We're pretty confident we had probably 25 million is pretty confident. Another 15 looks pretty good. The other is where it's still we need to keep working through those items to secure it. The hope is that this October, which might be a little bit ambitious, we would at least be able to start on the first phase of that, which would be roughly coming from where our pipeline stops currently, which is on the southern edge of Terrebonne, coming down into Redmond and where the parkway turns and there's Home Depot there on your left. That would be the termination of that of that phase that we're trying to complete. The the piping of the entire canal would conserve roughly 156 cubic feet per second, and that would be the water that would be conveyed up to North unit so as they are managing their water for habitat needs, they have a backfill of water reliable water forward. What. Myself and Michaela were kind of laughing about the project goal it's not the flashiest. of project goals, but I think the end result is pretty flashy. We're really looking to eliminate waste, keep water flowing where it needs to be, farmers, food, and to me, that means municipalities where you have restaurants, you have breweries, you have these things that Central Oregon's grown up with as of recently. fish. So it really is a multi-pronged goal through the EIS to deliver on the various needs of the basin. And these are the types of projects that are subject to NEPA review. It's a very, very thorough review. We've been working on it for about five years. The fact that we'd be taking federal dollars above that $25 million threshold, that's why we need to go through this very long, very intense review process. And again, hopefully the five years will be coming to a close this summer. The required public meeting in less than a week and then we get comments and i did provide uh flyers if you are interested in commenting or reviewing it more there's information on those flyers about how you can submit your comments um but uh it has not been a an endeavor that's been taken lightly we left no stone unturned um with the with the objective of being able to to fight this and work with various stakeholders in the basin to to use that water more efficiently It's somewhat obvious in terms of the purpose and need in terms of conserving irrigation water, but also improves reliability for a junior water rights holder. Again, not completely unique, but pretty rare. Really modernizing 100 plus year old system to deliver water. Right now, as you can imagine, managing an antiquated system with a lot of seepage, or rock-lined canals. We have occasional breaches where water just starts disappearing because the rocks have started to fall in. And so it'd be really nice to have a much more efficient system that's pressurized that you can necessarily gonna be able to turn on your spigot and have it run, but that's kind of the equivalent of it right now. That spigot just doesn't exist. It's an old system. It takes a while to charge. It's hard to manage. The antiquated nature of it makes it more difficult to be, I guess, creative with some conservation ideas that other stakeholders. So having a more efficient system will give us more flexibility to be more efficient delivery and then also put water to different uses. Obviously increasing the river flows is huge. And what doesn't get mentioned a whole lot that there is a significant public safety item associated with open canals. We have had some kids fall in there. There was a kid who lost his life maybe three, four years ago in the canal. I mean, they can be pretty inviting, especially with the really hot summer, but they're not water features, they're utilities. And so, you know, not only being able to operate them more efficiently, but also making sure that they're safer for the public in general, that's an important part. I mentioned that the historic districts, we had to along the pilot view canal if you're if you're driving up the parkway and if you see the pump track on the left and Redmond. that's part of the historic section of that canal there as part of the alternatives analysis, we had to look at three different options to deliver water through there, so we looked at keeping it in the canal and will piping in the canal. piping along our access road. We have the ditch rider access roads and then piping in Canal Boulevard. The preferred alternative after looking at costs, looking at disruption to area, looking at the space you have to use, the preferred alternative is to continue to use the existing canal, build within it, and mitigate. And I'll get into the mitigation strategy that we work with Oregon State Historic Preservation Office on. As we pipe, you know, some folks have asked, well, why don't you just leave the canal open? And as we pipe further south, you're getting more and more conservation. You're pushing more water through an area that used to lose that water. So the canal where it's at now, especially as we'll be delivering to Northeater as well, just physically isn't large enough to contain the amount of water that will be in there because we won't have the losses and seepage that it nears past. close to the city of Bend. This is just south of Juniper Ridge. There's a historic district there as well. Same thing. We looked at three different alternatives. The existing canal using 18th Street as well as Old Deschutes Road alignment. I was actually with the city when we were talking about 18th Street a few years ago. Just bidding in a 12-foot diameter pipe Gareth J. Those are going to be big in an existing right of way that already has other infrastructure is no small chore very expensive same with with the shoots road alignment so that the preferred alignment again is the historic canal building the the pipeline within that so Part of the EIS, which is documented, we worked with Oregon SHPO. The mitigation requirement at this point, or recommended, is we would work with the city of Redmond to do a pocket park or linear park, along the canal with really self-guided kiosks, providing information about the impact of irrigation in Central Oregon, agriculture, those types of things, using things like lava rocks and the old weirs and things just to kind of spruce things up. work on a video that we would put on our website and allow others to use that. Again, same idea. Let's look at the history of irrigation in Central Oregon. What's the importance of it? How has it led to the growth of Central Oregon in agriculture? Submitting an entry for the Oregon Encyclopedia and then creating a professional documented 125 or so page paper about the history of irrigation and COID that we would file with the Deschutes County or Deschutes Historic Society. So those are the things we're working with. I've been working very closely with City Redmond on that, with their Historic Landmarks Commission. I have my own thoughts about why folks might have gone and tried to get historic sections of canals designated, but we are looking to preserve the historic nature of and provide folks, you know, at least a touch point back to what the how things used to operate. So that might be At the end of the presentation so There's information there about our EIS process where you can submit comments. Again, if you're interested, Tuesday, I believe the doors open at 5. The presentation starts at 5.30, should run until about 7. And you'll be receiving public comments through March 31st. And then hopefully we will have a record of decision out sometime this summer. With that, I'd be happy to take questions.

Thank you, Mr. Skidmore. I liked the contrast between your presentation and the Water Master's presentation. So thank you for providing that. Do we have any questions? step up, step up, uh, made on contact with you first.

All right. Uh, John, thanks for the presentation. Um, it's deja vu here. I don't know. Was it 15, 20 years ago? You and I sat across from one another up there in city building, but, uh, Different context. What goes around comes around. Anyway, Mr. Skidmore, a few questions for you. One, a little bit, I've always kind of wondered this. I think I've read some about it, but I've never been fully satisfied. Can you clarify, I don't know, briefly, what is the legal status of an irrigation district? You know, is it a public entity, a private entity? I've heard it described as quasi-governmental. Is it a corporation? In a succinct way, what is an irrigation district?

We are a quasi-municipal agency.

Quasi-municipal.

Okay. So, you know, we have an elected board. We're a public entity. We keep public records of meetings and have to have forums and all the things. We just manage one item. We're like a special district. We manage an irrigation district, whereas City of Bend has all sorts of things they manage. The county manages others. But, yeah, so we are a quasi-municipal agency. Quasi-municipal. Our mission is to manage.

Okay. Thanks for that. I wonder if you would, if there's thoughts on your mind or if you would address the conflicts I sometimes see in the community, in the county and in the city in regard to recreational use of, I don't know if you call them ditch rider roads or canal access roads, some of which have complex easements along different stretches there for public use, trail easements and so forth. um, versus those that don't, but people still commonly trespass on them. I don't know. How big a problem is that for you?

And is that evolving or, uh, you know, I think we're very lucky to have Ben park and recreation district as a, as a partner and they, they help us manage, um, a lot of our, publicly accessible easements. And I'll provide a little more detail about the challenges of it. But in general, one thing I didn't mention, Central Oregon Irrigation District, through a series of just I guess circumstances over the past hundred plus years, we own 3,200 acres throughout Central Oregon. And so I can say without a doubt, as someone on our team that has to manage a lot of the, just the problems that arise with that amount of property, having more folks on the property doing constructive things like hiking, biking, jogging, walking, you know, recreating, that makes our job a lot easier. So where it's possible, We like to work with and others to provide access along our, our easements for, um, for our canals. The problem is. A lot of times our easements go across private property. So. I'll use you as an example, so let's pretend that I have an easement across your property for me to manage. My irrigation ditch that runs across it. I can't turn around and allow Commissioner Kyrus here to then use that to go running or biking or doing whatever they want with it. So we need the underlying property owners to agree to public access. And we have some that have been very willing to do so. We have a very, I would say, opportunistic and a very productive way uh parks district that has worked with us to pick up properties along the canals and things to make to make that easement relationship that much easier but for instance the um i say it's king's southeast bend i can't remember the name of the neighborhood pink forest forest A series of property owners, they don't want people walking. So in those instances, we really don't have the ability to say that, yes, we have an easement for irrigation purposes and you must allow public access. We just don't have that ability. So that's where the rub is. Again, for the properties that we own, and and i think the most part that most of the organization agrees it's it's a lot better to have eyes and ears on your property um just helps you manage it keep an eye on what's going on um and keep problem issues kind of you're able to

Okay, thanks for that answer. If I may, a couple more. I'm curious about generalizing district position, COID position on soil classification. In particular, in cases where soil classes that indicate sort of less value or thinner soils or less fertility, and there seems to be almost an attitude in certain quarters in the community that if it's rocky and thin soils, uh, it's not good for ag, then it's good for development. Yeehaw. Um, but, um, I'm wondering if the irrigation district, um, you know, um, advocates that, you know, if it's irrigated, all of a sudden that lower class soil becomes arable, it becomes fertile. I don't know. Is that too broad a question or broad?

I mean, I haven't heard our board opine on that. Um, Kayla and some of our other coworkers do a great job of working with our patrons to make sure that their water is put to beneficial use. But in terms of, you know, or editorial set of thoughts on soils types and zoning and water rights and application thereof by the board,

The context for that, as you can imagine, is EFU land conversions and that kind of thing. And people would argue, well, the soil classification is low. The only thing they grow there is rocks. And yet, actually, we find with creativity and the development of emerging markets, emerging crops and so forth, and with irrigation, that all of a sudden it makes sense that it's agricultural land. But thank you for addressing that, John. And then last... The previous presentation, there was the statistic that I think that piping is... I think it was an old statistic, but it was causing perhaps 10% it's estimated groundwater depletion. from old data and if it comes out that with ongoing piping and so forth that with the next study all of a sudden that percentage jumps significantly. What's going to be the reaction in district advocacy for piping when we confirm that all water is one water and all of a sudden that we're trading groundwater for surface water or vice versa?

Well, you know, we've seen, and we actually just met with the mayor of Redmond today and some of his staff, and there's that concern about impacts to groundwater. You know, that study, I don't know how old that study is. There's also other studies that say that the impact from canal piping is lower, but I think there's a variety of factors that are contributing to some of that groundwater decline. Obviously, A lot of droughts in the past 10, 20 years, so that's a big deal. We've also seen about, call it, 4,000 acres of what was once irrigated lands urbanized in the cities of Bend and Redmond. So you don't have four acre feet of water hitting those lands every year. the incidental recharge from that as well. And so, you know, I think, is there an impact? Yes. Is it huge? That's probably up for debate from what I've seen and what our EIS is explaining is that it's relatively minimal. But as we continue to better manage the water throughout the basin, There are concepts like artificial recharge projects and those types of things that are being discussed in these collaboratives and things that, you know, there's there's a potential to to offset some of those impacts.

Once we're better to once we're able to better manage the irrigation water that that's flowing through these leaky canals.

So it's you know, it's it's it's tricky. All the water is connected. worked really hard with the city of Redmond to provide some mitigation credits for their public facilities planning that they do through their UGB process. The change to groundwater rules kind of made those mitigation credits unusable. So the water world is ever-changing, but I think the stakeholders and the commitment of the various stakeholders, I think there's ways for us to address what we see through our data-driven scientific process through the EIS, the minimal impacts of piping. And I think, by and large, most folks would agree that, yes, it's probably better to deliver this water more efficiently than less efficiently. The other i guess component of that is once you have an efficient delivery system it's a lot easier for your patrons to then implement efficient irrigation systems on their end so they don't they don't have to spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on ponds and pumps and all these other things that they need to do once the water hits their property to pressurize it and get it out into these more efficient delivery systems so it's we understand there's a connection We're addressing it in the EIS, but we think the minimal impact from the modernization projects can be addressed in other ways.

Thank you, Mr. Skidmore. Thank you.

Any other questions? Thank you. Are other areas in the West doing this, piping their canals? Yes. Is Central Oregon a leader in this type of project, or are we...

I would say Central Oregon is probably in terms of the collaboration, even though, again, at times it's challenging. It's a little rough, but I wouldn't say that we're a leader in piping, and I don't know if Jeremy or others may have other thoughts. I know that there's districts up in the Tri-Cities area and things that are investing in it. Colorado is kind of the... age old debate about how to manage property on one side of the slope versus the other and for the farmers and for the growing cities. And so I think there's probably more of a global recognition of the need to efficiently manage this resource and managing it and delivering it through leaky lava rock line canals probably doesn't meet that mark. And I don't think we're the only ones that are in that situation. Different type of rock versus lava rock, but it's still not very efficient.

Okay, thanks. Any other questions? Yes.

What's maintenance for the piping look like? Like I was running along the flume down below Brookswood on the weekend and saw some of it leaking down below to secure up maintenance. And then also, is there much vandalism you see happening with like new piping and stuff?

Tragedy of the commons. You've got... infrastructure in areas that may not be as heavily traveled. So yeah, it can be a target for vandalism. district in a very quickly urbanizing area. We spent a lot of our time managing our facilities from the impacts of the development and urbanization that's surrounding us. For instance, we pulled three cars from quote-unquote dirt world out of our canal just beyond our hydro facility. We have routine tagging there and vandalism. We're an urbanizing area. We're an urbanizing district and We're trying to transition from reactionary to planning for it. And I think this piping is part of that. The pipe that you're talking about on the Brookswood property, I think that was constructed in the early 90s, late 80s. And yeah, it's a little bit old at this point, but As part of my understanding is part of the pressure relief system does have where some of those seams will allow for some seepage. That's right, where it's at. So it's not that we don't maintain our facilities. That's just how that particular piece of infrastructure was designed.

Thanks. Um, I might, I said one question, um, with the 18 mile, you know, pipeline. I'm curious if you had, I know it's very dependent on funding and, but if there is a general idea of the timeline, is it 20 years? Is it?

Uh, that's a great question. Uh, you know, we're hoping five to 10.

For the whole project. Wow.

Yeah. Again, a little bit of chaos in DC currently, but this tends to be the type of project that sells well on both sides of the aisle. You know, you've got water conservation, more water in the river, more efficient delivery that tends to send on the sell on the blue side. You've got, you know, let's just see. farmers, ag, putting folks to work, building these things that tends to sell on the red side. So it's a pretty universally supported type of program. It's just changing administrations and the struggles that go along with that has made what we thought was a pretty surefire bet on a large amount of funding that's just questionable at this point. But we're also one of the very few I think we're one of three districts in the country that has our, hopefully, our environmental impact statement completed. And so once you have your permits in place, a lot of times the money just starts to roll in a little bit quicker. So we're hoping that is going to be something to build on. And if you don't have your permits in place, sometimes programs are reluctant to provide the funding. But if we have the permits in place, we're hoping it follows pretty

Thank you very much for that wonderful presentation. And thank you to all our presenters today. The last thing I think on our schedule is comments from staff.

Yes, I was just going to say thank you again to our presenters. I think we'll start us off with staff comments. But yeah, just again wanted to thank our folks from Oregon Water Resources Department and Central Oregon Irrigation District. Really appreciate it. And also just want to let folks know you don't have to stick around if you don't want to. We're just going to continue with our project. Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah. Hey, everybody. Will Groves, your planning manager. I also appreciate the great presentations this evening. Let's see. What do we have coming up here? We've got some exciting transitions happening in our department. So Krista Appleby has been appointed as the new building official. hometown favorite and former assistant building official. So we're really happy to have that continuity in the department. We have some new hires in code enforcement and environmental soils, both of them with record numbers of applicants and the quality of those applicants was unusually high. That makes me wonder a little bit about the overall economy when you see that many people show up from the job. Sometimes we get a handful of people, sometimes we get dozens. Here we got hundreds. So Seeing lots of people interested in these positions cumulatively. Thinking about natural resources, of course, I'll let you know that the county forester position has been restyled as a community wildfire protection supervisor. And that position manages a team of two other natural resource specialists that work on wildfire protection plans and project wildfire. And that job is just about to be published. So that'll be out for a month and hopefully to get a get a good candidate to fill that position, a very important community role. In addition, just want to let you know that, you know, what's coming up, of course, we've got the on our next meeting. We've got the session for the work, the annual work plan, of course. Got CDD's work plan together and definitely looking for your community feedback on that first with a work session on the 26th and then hearing the subsequent meeting. And then we're headed into the City of Sisters UGB expansion. So they're in the process of working on that. That comes through our planning commission and board. And so hearings associated with that coming up in the future. And following that, you know, we're also tracking defensible space. So the state fire marshals in the process of finalizing a model code associated with defensible space. And that's going to be, as we understand it, a voluntary code. So no built-in enforcement mechanisms or requirements associated with it. It'll be up to local jurisdictions what, if anything, to do with that. And it will be interesting to see. We're anticipating seeing a presentation to the board from the state fire marshal about that code. And subsequently, we'll see what type of engagement the board wants to entertain for the community. In some areas, that defensible space is handled entirely by a fire department or other public agency. In some places, there's partnership with community development departments and permitting requirements. So not to get ahead of the board there, but it'd be interesting to see how they respond to that opportunity. And also, we've got some house, some legislation from this year. You know, we talked a little bit about legislative action that was coming through. And there were three things that particularly had my attention. We talked a little bit about House Bill 4037. This changes, you know, we've worked so much on clear and objective applications. And this changes the appeal process and notice process for these clear and objective applications. frankly designed to limit appeal options for opponents to these clear and objective housing applications. In practice, we don't see a lot of these. You'll remember that in the effort to create apples to apples clear and objective applications that captured most of the concerns that existed in the current code, by spelling those out, it really limited applicants' discretionary flexibility And we haven't seen a lot of people looking for those protections of the clear and objective applications. But this change in the notice and appeal rights that will kick in in the new year may increase interest in that. House Bill 4153. So this creates a farm store. Of course, you're familiar with farm stands and agritourism. This is a very permissive bill that allows farms of certain sizes. There's acreage requirements for both total parcel size and in active farm use. And it can be done across the farm operations. You could have multiple parcels involved, but really pretty broad about what can be included. Farm to table dinners. other types of retail sales that lack some of the kind of tight sideboards that we've seen historically. There'd been a real concern over the years from the legislature and the Land Use Board of Appeals with the notion of the tail wagging the dog that some of these incidental activities on farm properties would end up being kind of the primary activity on the property. And this is a step significantly further to give opportunity to our farmers to have some secondary economic activities on those properties. Another nice one, relatively smaller one that in terms of the use is Senate Bill 1561. And this reduces the number of regulatory obligations that someone has when their house in a farm or forest zone has been destroyed by fire or other natural hazard. So we actually have someone in from the from the flat fire that's looking to replace a dwelling and that the the current regulations associated that we're proving a little bit difficult. So this this makes it relatively easy to replace your dwelling lost by natural disaster and farmer forest zones. So those are the big ones that we're tracking coming out of the legislature. And we'll keep you posted as those come online.

The TRT one, that nudged the percentage of money that can be used of the tourist money toward wildlife programs. That income, does that come at all to the county? Do you know off the top of your head, Will?

I know that there was some dollars associated that for wolf, wolf deprivation, but I'm not sure exactly how those came out. I was, uh, more watching. There were dollars associated, um, with, uh, fire with kind of wildfire prevention efforts. And so, you know, those, those dollars came through. Oh, also interesting, uh, Terrebonne for their, uh, for their sanitary district got 2.4 million from the legislature. So that's a major, major contribution. They'll help them keep online with their, their project.

All right. I have just a few additional updates. So just wanted to keep you updated on the status of the comprehensive plan. We're expecting a decision from the Land Use Board of Appeals, I believe, on March 24th. So hopefully we'll get that very soon. And then also wanted to give an update on the Terrebonne Community Plan update. So we do have the initial open house scheduled for Tuesday, April 7th from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Terrebonne Community School in their cafeteria. So I'll distribute the flyer for that event to the planning commission. We could use your help in spreading the word for that. Just an opportunity for folks to, you know, hear a little bit more about the project. It's kind of a drop in event. So kind of poster board situation. We'll have food and we'll also have a kids activity. So family friendly as well. And the website for that is deshoots.org slash TCP. So pretty easy to remember, but we'll send that to you as well. And there's a project mailing list that folks can sign up for for additional updates. And I believe that's all I have.

Thank you, staff. And Nicole, I think it's a great idea to have a kid be kid-friendly because I know it's a deterrent for a lot of families to be able to make those kind of events. So thank you for including family-friendly.

Yes.

Just a question about that.

Who should, like, which community members should or maybe would be interested in such an event? Like people who only live in Terrebonne proper, people who live

the outskirts of tarragon people who live who travel through tarragon to get to where they live people at crooked river ranch what do you suggest might be helpful yeah i think that's a great question um obviously the folks that are going to be i would say most impacted by the planner that's the boundary um because it is a specific community boundary but that being said it is you know a destination for folks in the area so if you travel into tarragon for shopping restaurant, or you're just driving on Highway 97, I think there's still valuable input that folks could provide. So I think we're seeing it as come one, come all, but the plan itself does only apply to that specific boundary of the rural community.

That makes sense. Okay. We have commissioner comments. Commissioner Stockkamp, I'll start with you.

No comments. Thanks for a good panel tonight.

Okay.

Good meeting. Good job. Thank you. Commissioner Kierst.

Yeah, I also enjoyed the panel. I know I didn't have as many questions as everyone. I kind of really appreciated all of you guys' questions, but I thought the whole presentation was very engaging and interesting to learn about. So I know everyone's gone now, but thank you to them.

Commissioner Hofkamp.

Yeah, I liked reading the information in the packet and going to the links from the previous presentations and panels that we had. So I appreciate providing that. Always like learning more about Waterworld. So like the presentation tonight from OWRD and COID. And, you know, I learn more incrementally with each one of these kinds of things and programs. And at the rate I'm going, about 100 years from now, I might actually begin to scratch the surface of understanding water law. You know, the one thing that's always on my mind, though, just from, you know, sort of teaching in biology and stuff and basic ecology principles and stuff like that, is the idea of a limiting resource. You know, that of the different resources that limit the productivity of an ecosystem, there's one that's the limiting resource. And for us, it's water. And, you know, I... all of this slicing and dicing again, I learned different directions of water and different administrations of water and water programs and so forth. It's still, it's not creating new water. There's only that so much water there. And anyway, that's always on my mind when we think about traditional ways and how the long history of irrigation districts and so forth. And then the increasing municipal use, it's still a drop in the bucket compared to agricultural use, but you know, there's all of these factors and then they're very dynamic. And, um, anyway, uh, it's interesting to learn and it's fairly high stakes. So, yeah, I appreciate that.

Uh, commissioner Williams.

So I know commissioner, uh, curious sat in on the other, uh, water panels i believe it was 2018 so she has definitely absorbed a lot of information about this and unfortunately i had meant to mention this when jeremy and carolyn were still here that i was very pleased to see that the north unit irrigation district as a lower right is getting water because they are the most productive farmlands in the area and that was something you know as you read it it's shocking that uh you know and i i get it you know oldest best you know been here but uh really nice uh when they were presenting that they were showing how these leases and these givebacks are helping NUID. So that was something I wish I had had the opportunity to tell them. But otherwise, I want to say, Vice Chair Kelly, great first job.

Thank you very much. I was a little nervous, I will admit. And Nicole, I just really wanted my final comment. Thank you. I thought those are really great picks for speakers because it was, you know, someone was very data driven and then someone was more like social driven. And so I thought that was just a really cool balance to see. So good job selecting our speakers tonight. So thank you. And thank you, Will. And thank you. colleagues. And at 7.22, I call it adjourn.