Clean water, strong rivers, and healthy fish and wildlife are part of Oregon’s identity, yet many of our state’s outdated water laws are at odds with those values. Right now we have a chance to protect the public benefits our rivers provide by tightening a dangerous loophole that currently allows the Oregon Water Resources Department (OWRD) to approve water right changes — even if they hurt our streams.
We need your help NOW to pass an important bill. If signed into law, Senate Bill 1153 will require the OWRD to consider potential streamflow impacts as part of its existing process for reviewing proposed water right changes, called “transfers,” for non-municipal users to upstream points of diversion, or wells that move within a quarter mile of a stream.
Brought by Governor Kotek’s office, SB 1153 has been championed throughout the 2025 legislative session by our Oregon Water Partnership, which relies on the collective power of our seven statewide conservation groups to tackle Oregon’s toughest water challenges. Our related bill SB 427 is now functionally dead in the legislature, so we’ve thrown our support behind SB 1153 as the best opportunity to make a difference for our rivers in this session — and we need your continued help!
Recent amendments to SB 1153 reflect weeks of hard-fought negotiations with those who oppose it. The result is a narrower bill that focuses on water changes with the highest risk of harm for non-municipal users — when points of diversion are moved upstream, and when moving a well within a quarter mile of a stream.
Over the coming weeks, SB 1153 needs to survive tough votes in the Senate and the House. Please take a moment to tell your state legislators you support this common sense bill, and they should too!
Here’s how you can help:
- Add your comments in support of SB 1153 into the submit testimony web form for the Senate Rules Committee, and be sure to enter your “position on the measure” as “support.”
- Click on “text testimony” at the bottom of the form to add your written testimony (see the sample text below).
- Email your Oregon senator and representative TODAY and tell them to vote YES on SB 1153 (see the sample text below). It’s important for your state senator and representative to hear from constituents like you so they can consider your input for floor votes. To find your state senator and representative, type your address into the Find My Legislator website to get their names and email addresses.
Your message doesn’t have to be complicated. Feel free to copy and paste the message below, but we encourage you to add your own personal experience about the value of healthy Oregon rivers and streams to add power to your message.
Please vote YES on Senate Bill 1153 to safeguard streamflows in water right transfers.
The water in our streams is our state’s lifeblood. It grows our salmon and our food, and it fuels our families. It ties us to our neighbors upstream and downstream. It belongs to all of us.
Yet for far too long, an outdated loophole has allowed the Oregon Water Resources Department to approve applications for water right transfers without adequate consideration of whether the change will harm streamflows.
Senate Bill 1153 helps to safeguard our streams — and the fish, wildlife, and water quality values they support — by ensuring a narrow subset of proposed water right changes won’t further diminish flows in unprotected streams. For non-municipal users, this will help guard against harm for most proposed upstream stream diversion changes or movement of groundwater wells within a quarter mile of streams.
This bill also enhances existing processes for tribal consultation with a goal of identifying and addressing potential impacts to tribal interests in water.
I urge your support of SB 1153 and the life-sustaining streamflows it will safeguard.
Sincerely,
(your name)
There’s more at the Oregon Water Partnership’s previous testimony on SB 1153 from earlier this year.
Thank you for speaking up for our state’s hard-working rivers and the ecosystems and livelihoods they sustain!
Banner action alert photo by Tommy Hough, Middle Fork Willamette footer photo by Jesse Robbins.
