Water Use Harms: The Unintended Consequences of Beneficial Use
This report [linked above] discusses Oregon’s need to assess and address the harms resulting from the beneficial use of water. The report supplements our recent review of water governance and management titled: No, We’re Not There Yet: Modernizing the Conventional Wisdom.
For over a century, Oregon has overlooked the debit side of the water use ledger and focused predominantly on the benefits of water use – the credit side. This bias harms the public health, safety, and welfare, and the health of the ecosystem. In too many cases, water use benefits accrue to the water right holders while the downsides, mostly ignored, pile up on others. Privatizing the benefits while externalizing the costs by ignoring them has resulted in dewatered streams, drained aquifers, impaired water quality, and habitat degradation.
Much can be said about the harm to flora, fauna, soils, groundwater reservoirs, streams, and even water itself. However, the negative impacts on humans, resulting from negligent water policies that seek approval from the largest water users, loom among the worst breaches of trust by officials when set in the context of Oregon’s Constitution, which states in Article 1, Section 20: “No law shall be passed granting to any citizen or class of citizens privileges, or immunities, which, upon the same terms, shall not equally belong to all citizens.” That officials would preempt access to water of good quality to citizens by first seeking approval of a minority (privileged by its political access) to shape water laws on their behalf is a severe breach of trust between officials and the broader public, particularly when officials grant large water users privileged access to shape laws and policies in ways that undermine the common good. Not only does preferential treatment in water policy violate the principle of equality under the law, but it also corrupts the vested rights to use the public’s water that water right certificates authorize.
To the extent that every action has an equal opposite reaction, many claims of beneficial use will include misrepresentations of fact until officials assess and address the consequent harms related to those water uses. Oregon has only ever required claims of beneficial use at the very start of water right certificates’ issuance when they are perfected. Water uses authorized by tens of thousands of water right certificates go unaudited for decades. The state has never instituted periodic reviews of water right certificates to determine whether the water uses they authorize are, indeed, beneficial uses. Untold harms persist and worsen: while individual water users may enjoy the benefits of using water that belongs to the public, the public and the ecosystem they rely upon endure hardship. Refusing to assess the harms to avoid addressing them is a well-worn practice that must end, if not for the public of the present, then for our future descendants.