Instream: Celebrating Four Decades of Success

April 14, 2025

By Neil Brandt

Despite the threats of federal rollbacks to bedrock environmental statutes, slashing of key federal agency personnel, and wholly unprecedented attacks on our nation’s conservation legacy, we at WaterWatch are nevertheless celebrating our four decades of work and success in 2025. Despite the chaos coming out of Washington, D.C., we continue to see strong, lasting opportunities to protect and restore our state’s rivers and streams through our advocacy in largely state-governed processes here in Oregon. I am honored and humbled to lead this incredible organization as we build upon our four decades of victories for Oregon’s rivers.

WaterWatch was formed in 1985 when Tom and Audrey Simmons joined forces to address Oregon’s decades-long habit of giving away new rights to use water — a public resource — for free, without considering the impacts on our rivers or fish through processes dominated by agricultural, municipal, and industrial interests.

This situation was not unique to Oregon. Across the West, rivers frequently ran dry under antiquated water laws that failed to meaningfully consider the needs of rivers, fish, wildlife, or the public interest in water. To address this dramatic imbalance between private and public uses of water, Tom and Audrey founded WaterWatch of Oregon. For 40 years, WaterWatch has pushed back against the major inequities of Oregon’s antiquated prior appropriation water rights system, and has given a voice to Oregon’s rivers for the fish, wildlife, and people that depend on healthy rivers to survive.

Today, we’ve grown to a team of 11 expert staff members that work in every river basin in Oregon to fight for flows in our rivers, streams, lakes, wetlands. We fight for the water that belongs to us — the public — to remain in streams rather than be diverted for extractive interests. Yet even today, it remains legal to drain our rivers dry, and there are many such extractive interests that seek to do so. In a climate-changed Oregon, the need for WaterWatch’s advocacy is more pressing than ever.

WaterWatch is also building upon our victories from last year. We are advocating for Oregon’s recently adopted groundwater allocation rules to ensure they are firmly implemented by the state and are not rolled back or weakened. We will continue to remove obsolete dams, and ensure the completion of the Pomeroy Dam removal project on the Illinois River, which has improved access to over 100 miles of high-quality habitat for several endangered fish species.

We will support Oregon’s adoption of new instream water rights, advocate for conservation values in four collaborative processes, continue to watchdog all water permits issued by the state and intervene where appropriate, and work in the Oregon legislature to pass bills that support healthy rivers. In short, WaterWatch will be there to lend our voice to Oregon’s rivers in 2025 — and beyond.

Our three issues of Instream in 2025 will feature articles highlighting the past, present, and future of WaterWatch, beginning with an interview with founding board member and conservation heavyweight Bob Hunter in this issue. Indeed, as we celebrate our 40th anniversary, we have a lot of ground to cover as WaterWatch’s list of wins begins right out of the gate with the passage of the 1987 Instream Water Rights Act and continues through each decade with even more impactful accomplishments for Oregon’s waters.