At a Senate subcommittee hearing Wednesday, Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden rattled off a list of Oregonians struggling to meet basic water needs. He mentioned , polluted groundwater and , and years of boil water notices .
Wyden called on several federal agencies to collect national data on who doesn鈥檛 have safe water and direct more funding toward rural residents and Tribes.
鈥淚t鈥檚 hard to believe that in 2023 our country doesn鈥檛 even have some basic facts about the key issues to improve water quality, like who has indoor plumbing in America that actually works,鈥� he told members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
The hearing was part of a series of . Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Chairperson Jonathan W. Smith traveled across the country to testify.
People on the reservation have endured years of water outages as they await the completion of a new, $24 million water treatment plant. Even when it鈥檚 built, the new plant won鈥檛 prevent boil water notices prompted by many other infrastructure failings, such as miles of crumbling pipes.
Smith said drought and pollution from cities and farms also make it harder to use the reservation鈥檚 water supply.
鈥淲e rely on Deschutes River as our source of drinking water,鈥� Smith said, 鈥淏ut we are downstream from rapidly growing communities like Bend and Redmond, as well as thousands of acres of irrigated agriculture. As a result, our drinking water quality is impaired.鈥�
Smith urged lawmakers to prioritize funding for river conservation. He also said federal agencies often require tribes to share as much as half the cost of big-ticket projects, which makes it hard to use federal funding at all.
Wyden pressed a senior Department of the Interior official to say whether any of some $550 million lawmakers recently allocated to that agency for water infrastructure would be used to help people in Warm Springs and the Klamath Basin.
鈥淎s the program is still under development, those are ideas that we鈥檙e willing to take into consideration,鈥� replied Michael Brain, an Interior deputy assistant secretary who specializes in water.
Wyden also singled out the failings of Oregon state water managers.
鈥淚n my state and across the county, one person is in charge of managing water quality, one person is managing water quantity, and another is looking at affordability,鈥� Wyden said.
鈥淪ometimes one hand doesn鈥檛 know what the other hand is doing 鈥� This needs to be fixed.鈥�
The senator asked the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the DOI to work together to collect more data to show where investment is most needed.
Copyright 2023 Oregon Public Broadcasting
