By Mateusz Perkowski | June 30, 2025 | Capital Press
Oregon’s legislative session ended with lawmakers not taking action on bills that would impose new environmental review regulations on certain water rights transfers.
The debate over stricter rules for water rights transfers persisted throughout the session, but even the proposal with the most momentum, Senate Bill 1153, ultimately died in committee on June 27th.
Proponents claimed that Oregon has gone too long without considering the environmental consequences of such transfers, but critics feared that additional reviews would inevitably lead to more red tape and litigation.
“If you have a drought situation, and you need to divert where you are using or diverting water, it can’t be a years-long thing,” said Greg Addington, executive director of the Oregon Farm Bureau.
Supporters countered that worries about SB 1153 immobilizing transfers were overblown, particularly since the types of transactions subject to environmental reviews was limited under the most recent version of the proposal.
“In the 21st Century, knowing what we know now, it is reasonable for us to be looking at the impacts of proposed transfers,” said Caylin Barter, water policy director for the Wild Salmon Center nonprofit and a representative of the Oregon Water Partnership, a coalition of conservation groups.
Several bills affecting water rights transfers were introduced during the 2025 session, including Senate Bill 427, which would have prohibited upstream transfers that reduced stream flows, and House Bill 3501, which meant to preserve the status quo by banning public interest reviews of transfers.
Ultimately, most of the discussion centered on SB 1153, which had the backing of Gov. Tina Kotek and whose scope was amended after months of negotiations.
In the latest version considered by lawmakers, SB 1153 would have required environmental reviews of transfers that shift a point of diversion upstream or move a well within a quarter-mile of a waterway, which have the potential to reduce streamflows.
Reviews under the amended bill would focus on sensitive and protected fish, rather than aquatic species more generally, and exempt transfers that change the place of use, among other provisions.
Tribal governments would have also been allowed to review the effects of transfers in certain areas under SB 1153.
Critics of the bill, including the state’s major agriculture organizations, claimed the proposal was a solution in search of a problem.
“There was not a single example of how a transfer had caused harm to the environment,” said April Snell, executive director of the Oregon Water Resources Congress, which represents irrigation districts.
By introducing additional reviews, the bill would also create new opportunities for such transactions to be challenged at a time when the Oregon Water Resources Department (OWRD) already faces a backlog of water rights transactions and administrative challenges, according to critics.
“It creates a whole lot of work for the department, which can’t get its core functions done anyway,” said Jeff Stone, executive director of the Oregon Association of Nurseries.
Due to the amendment, city governments were exempted from having their transfers reviewed by the agency, eliminating one of the main blocks of opposition to the bill.
Before their objections were neutralized, however, the concerns raised by cities likely made some lawmakers hesitant to support the proposal, said Addington of the Farm Bureau.
“Even when they were excluded, legislators knew there were problems with this bill,” he said.
The exemption for municipalities also seemed driven by “political expediency,” since irrigators are also subject to federal and state environmental regulations when working within waterways, Addington said.
“That just didn’t ring true for our folks,” he said.
Barter of the Oregon Water Partnership said it’s “disingenuous” to claim that transfers have not caused environmental problems, since that potential is entirely unexamined under existing transfer regulations.
Concerns about transfers, which have existed for decades, are justified by the known constraints on Oregon’s water supplies, she said.
“It is incumbent we modernize these transfer statutes to ensure we are not making things worse.” It was never the intent of SB 1153 to increase litigation and it’s unlikely that’s how the bill would have played out in reality, since environmental groups are not responsible for most existing disputes over water rights transactions, she said.
“The vast majority of challenges are not brought by public interest groups, but by the applicant or a neighbor,” Barter said.
Furthermore, the latest version of the proposal was written in a way that would’ve encouraged OWRD and applicants to negotiate and prevent a “tiny subset” of transfers from harming stream flows, she said.
“That was built into the amendment, that process for evaluating potentially problematic applications,” she said.
Despite the significant narrowing of the bill’s scope, there was never a “commensurate reduction” in the political “temperature” surrounding the proposal, said James Fraser, Oregon policy director for the Trout Unlimited nonprofit.
Lawmakers were still hearing a lot about SB 1153 driving farmers out of business or causing a surge of litigation in the final days of session, even though the bill affected only a small number of transactions that harm native migratory fish, he said.
“Water policy is always a tough issue in the Legislature,” Fraser said. “It attracts a tremendous amount of attention from people with very different perspectives.”
Republican lawmakers apparently included SB 1153 on a list of bills that would trigger a walkout, so the proposal was likely “sacrificed” to keep them in the building, said Kimberley Priestley, senior water policy analyst with the WaterWatch of Oregon nonprofit.
“Unfortunately, politics prevailed over substance,” Priestley said.
Even so, with the increasing use of transfers in both agricultural and municipal development, supporters expect the environmental review of transfers to be a “priority issue” in future sessions, she said. “This is not a topic that is going away.”
Barter noted that this year’s debate put the transfer regulations on many lawmakers’ radar.
“There was a lot of surprise that our laws are the way they are,” she said. “We are hearing there is interest on continuing the conversations on solving this problem. This is a start, this is not the end.”
Jeff Stone of the Oregon Association of Nurseries said the agricultural community is always willing to find solutions if there’s “actual harm happening,” though it’s important to be careful in changing such a complex area of the law.
“I don’t want to hit the repeat cycle on this,” he said. “That’s just not productive.”
This article originally appeared in the June 30, 2025, issue of Capital Press.