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Group alleges Port of Morrow misled Kotek for permission to dump toxic water

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Wednesday, March 5, 2025

A group of 26 conservation nonprofits, grassroots organizations and community leaders have signed a letter sent to Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek alleging the Port of Morrow, located along the Columbia River in northeastern Oregon, intentionally misled the governor about its wastewater storage capacity while seeking an emergency order earlier this year. The Feb. 21 letter, authored by advocacy group Oregon Rural Action and undersigned by a former Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) administrator and a former Morrow County commissioner, among others, requests that the governor rescind an executive order she made in January that allows the Port of Morrow to violate its wastewater permit. “We believe this decision was misguided and may have been based on incomplete, misleading, or inaccurate information,” the letter reads. “[The executive order] needlessly allows for increased pollution during the high-risk winter season when the risk to the public is highest, threatening to worsen an already severe crisis.”The letter also requests the governor declare a public health and environmental emergency in the Lower Umatilla Basin due to nitrate pollution in groundwater within the Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Area.A spokesperson for the Office of Governor Kotek told Columbia Insight in an email that her office had received the letter and is reviewing it. The Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Area, which spans 550 square miles across Morrow and Umatilla counties along the Columbia River, has been plagued with high levels of nitrates in groundwater since the 1990s.A report released by Oregon DEQ in January found that nitrate contamination, driven primarily by agricultural practices, has continued to worsen over the past decade.“The people who are affected by this pollution, the victims of pollution, are low-income, non-English speaking, disproportionately Latino and immigrants, working class,” Kaleb Lay, director of policy and research at Oregon Rural Action, told Columbia Insight. “They don’t have a lot of power on their own, but that’s why we’re supposed to have regulations and laws—so the polluters can’t get away with this sort of thing.” Chronic polluterThe Port of Morrow, Oregon’s largest industrial port east of Portland, accepts wastewater from industrial businesses such as food processing plants, data centers and a PG&E-owned power plant.The Port then moves that nitrogen-rich wastewater upgradient for land application on agricultural fields.Specific conditions must be met for the land application of wastewater. The Port is only allowed to dump a certain amount of wastewater at a time to agricultural land in order to ensure the nitrates don’t reach groundwater stores.Land application during the rainy season is especially tricky, because if the soil is already saturated with water (from, say, a run of rainy weather), the Port must wait until the soil dries before spreading wastewater.The wastewater is stored in lagoons until it can be disposed of. “The fundamental problem is the Port has chronically—for years, years and years—produced way more [wastewater] than the fields where they’re allowed to dispose of it can possibly handle, which creates this leaching problem, which leads to permit violations and contaminates the groundwater,” said Lay. A 2022 investigation by the Oregon Capital Chronicle found the Port had violated its wastewater permits for the previous 15 years. In the last two years, DEQ has fined the Port more than $3.1 million for permit violations. The Port is in the midst of building out more lagoons to store the wastewater, a move that it hopes will end future winter water dumps on the land. Those lagoons are expected to be completed by November 2025. Executive order suspends rulesAmid a spell of unusually wet weather in December 2024, the Port of Morrow requested the governor sign an emergency order that would allow it to violate wastewater regulations, arguing that the predicted precipitation and freezing conditions would overwhelm its wastewater storage capacity, thus forcing the Port to exceed its land-application capacity.Without the order, the Port argued, it wouldn’t have any choice but to stop accepting wastewater, because it wouldn’t have any place to legally put it. That decision might have forced the industrial facilities generating wastewater to cease operations, which in turn could have led to “furloughs of potentially thousands of workers resulting in substantial economic harm to the region and the State of Oregon,” according to Gov. Kotek’s subsequent executive order (EO), issued Jan. 13.The EO granted the Port of Morrow’s request and declared a state of emergency “due to risk of economic shutdown” in Morrow and Umatilla counties.The EO allows the Port to apply wastewater only to fields that are down-gradient from domestic wells or those that are designated as low-risk for contamination. “I did not make this decision lightly,” Kotek said in a news release. “We must balance protecting thousands of jobs in the region, the national food supply, and domestic well users during this short period of time during an unusually wet winter.” Kotek’s order allows an exception to the Port of Morrow’s wastewater permit only from Jan. 15 through Feb. 28.The Port of Morrow officially invoked the EO’s use on Feb. 17, nearly a month after the EO was issued. Port of Morrow Executive Director Lisa Mittelsdorf told Columbia Insight in an emailed statement that the Port was able to delay invoking the order thanks to conservation efforts and management of its storage-lagoon capacity.“The order was invoked in accordance with its terms only when the Port determined that available storage capacity would be exhausted within seven days. As required by the order, the Port restricted land application to two farms with no down-gradient domestic users of alluvial groundwater,” the statement reads.Worrying precedentOregon Rural Action, however, doesn’t think the Port of Morrow was being honest in its emergency order request.In its letter to Gov. Kotek, the group compared statements and arguments used in the emergency request against the Port of Morrow’s own monthly reports to DEQ. “It’s a paper-thin argument that falls apart right away,” said Lay.He said the Port’s DEQ report states its storage capacity was only at 44% at the end of December, with roughly 335 million gallons of capacity available, despite the Port’s claim to the governor’s office that it was running out of storage space.“At the same time, they were expecting to produce less wastewater than they had in the previous two months,” said Lay. “So for the remainder of the winter [including January and February] they had more than half their wastewater storage available to them, and were expecting to make less [wastewater in January and February], which would lead one to believe that they could store all of what was left without much trouble at all.“It just doesn’t seem like that due diligence was done in the making of this decision to grant them this power.” The EO is set to expire at the end of this week, but “every day counts,” according to Lay.And concerns persist over the setting of a controversial precedent based on faulty information.“The permit conditions exist for a reason. They’re not perfect, but every violation that [occurs] is a violation because [the permit] is trying to prevent contamination of groundwater. Allowing them to violate without holding them accountable is just giving them a free pass to pollute,” said Lay. Kendra Chamberlain is a freelance journalist based in Eugene, Oregon, covering environment, energy and climate change. Her work has appeared in DeSmog Blog, High Country News, InvestigateWest and Ensia.##Columbia Insight, based in Hood River, Oregon, is a nonprofit news site focused on environmental issues of the Columbia River Basin and the Pacific Northwest.

The Port successfully petitioned the state for an executive order to suspend environmental regulations in order to save jobs.

The Feb. 21 letter, authored by advocacy group Oregon Rural Action and undersigned by a former Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) administrator and a former Morrow County commissioner, among others, requests that the governor rescind an executive order she made in January that allows the Port of Morrow to violate its wastewater permit.

“We believe this decision was misguided and may have been based on incomplete, misleading, or inaccurate information,” the letter reads. “[The executive order] needlessly allows for increased pollution during the high-risk winter season when the risk to the public is highest, threatening to worsen an already severe crisis.”

The letter also requests the governor declare a public health and environmental emergency in the Lower Umatilla Basin due to nitrate pollution in groundwater within the Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Area.

A spokesperson for the Office of Governor Kotek told Columbia Insight in an email that her office had received the letter and is reviewing it.

The Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Area, which spans 550 square miles across Morrow and Umatilla counties along the Columbia River, has been plagued with high levels of nitrates in groundwater since the 1990s.

A report released by Oregon DEQ in January found that nitrate contamination, driven primarily by agricultural practices, has continued to worsen over the past decade.

“The people who are affected by this pollution, the victims of pollution, are low-income, non-English speaking, disproportionately Latino and immigrants, working class,” Kaleb Lay, director of policy and research at Oregon Rural Action, told Columbia Insight. “They don’t have a lot of power on their own, but that’s why we’re supposed to have regulations and laws—so the polluters can’t get away with this sort of thing.”

Chronic polluter

The Port of Morrow, Oregon’s largest industrial port east of Portland, accepts wastewater from industrial businesses such as food processing plants, data centers and a PG&E-owned power plant.

The Port then moves that nitrogen-rich wastewater upgradient for land application on agricultural fields.

Specific conditions must be met for the land application of wastewater. The Port is only allowed to dump a certain amount of wastewater at a time to agricultural land in order to ensure the nitrates don’t reach groundwater stores.

Land application during the rainy season is especially tricky, because if the soil is already saturated with water (from, say, a run of rainy weather), the Port must wait until the soil dries before spreading wastewater.

The wastewater is stored in lagoons until it can be disposed of.

“The fundamental problem is the Port has chronically—for years, years and years—produced way more [wastewater] than the fields where they’re allowed to dispose of it can possibly handle, which creates this leaching problem, which leads to permit violations and contaminates the groundwater,” said Lay.

A 2022 investigation by the Oregon Capital Chronicle found the Port had violated its wastewater permits for the previous 15 years. In the last two years, DEQ has fined the Port more than $3.1 million for permit violations.

The Port is in the midst of building out more lagoons to store the wastewater, a move that it hopes will end future winter water dumps on the land. Those lagoons are expected to be completed by November 2025.

Executive order suspends rules

Amid a spell of unusually wet weather in December 2024, the Port of Morrow requested the governor sign an emergency order that would allow it to violate wastewater regulations, arguing that the predicted precipitation and freezing conditions would overwhelm its wastewater storage capacity, thus forcing the Port to exceed its land-application capacity.

Without the order, the Port argued, it wouldn’t have any choice but to stop accepting wastewater, because it wouldn’t have any place to legally put it. That decision might have forced the industrial facilities generating wastewater to cease operations, which in turn could have led to “furloughs of potentially thousands of workers resulting in substantial economic harm to the region and the State of Oregon,” according to Gov. Kotek’s subsequent executive order (EO), issued Jan. 13.

The EO granted the Port of Morrow’s request and declared a state of emergency “due to risk of economic shutdown” in Morrow and Umatilla counties.

The EO allows the Port to apply wastewater only to fields that are down-gradient from domestic wells or those that are designated as low-risk for contamination.

“I did not make this decision lightly,” Kotek said in a news release. “We must balance protecting thousands of jobs in the region, the national food supply, and domestic well users during this short period of time during an unusually wet winter.”

Kotek’s order allows an exception to the Port of Morrow’s wastewater permit only from Jan. 15 through Feb. 28.

The Port of Morrow officially invoked the EO’s use on Feb. 17, nearly a month after the EO was issued.

Port of Morrow Executive Director Lisa Mittelsdorf told Columbia Insight in an emailed statement that the Port was able to delay invoking the order thanks to conservation efforts and management of its storage-lagoon capacity.

“The order was invoked in accordance with its terms only when the Port determined that available storage capacity would be exhausted within seven days. As required by the order, the Port restricted land application to two farms with no down-gradient domestic users of alluvial groundwater,” the statement reads.

Worrying precedent

Oregon Rural Action, however, doesn’t think the Port of Morrow was being honest in its emergency order request.

In its letter to Gov. Kotek, the group compared statements and arguments used in the emergency request against the Port of Morrow’s own monthly reports to DEQ.

“It’s a paper-thin argument that falls apart right away,” said Lay.

He said the Port’s DEQ report states its storage capacity was only at 44% at the end of December, with roughly 335 million gallons of capacity available, despite the Port’s claim to the governor’s office that it was running out of storage space.

“At the same time, they were expecting to produce less wastewater than they had in the previous two months,” said Lay. “So for the remainder of the winter [including January and February] they had more than half their wastewater storage available to them, and were expecting to make less [wastewater in January and February], which would lead one to believe that they could store all of what was left without much trouble at all.

“It just doesn’t seem like that due diligence was done in the making of this decision to grant them this power.”

The EO is set to expire at the end of this week, but “every day counts,” according to Lay.

And concerns persist over the setting of a controversial precedent based on faulty information.

“The permit conditions exist for a reason. They’re not perfect, but every violation that [occurs] is a violation because [the permit] is trying to prevent contamination of groundwater. Allowing them to violate without holding them accountable is just giving them a free pass to pollute,” said Lay.

Kendra Chamberlain is a freelance journalist based in Eugene, Oregon, covering environment, energy and climate change. Her work has appeared in DeSmog Blog, High Country News, InvestigateWest and Ensia.

Columbia Insight, based in Hood River, Oregon, is a nonprofit news site focused on environmental issues of the Columbia River Basin and the Pacific Northwest.

Read the full story here.

Photos courtesy of

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When scientists found a carcinogen in Santa Rosa's drinking water after the Tubbs fire, it triggered a race to develop measures to keep residents safe. The L.A. fires put them to the test.

A month after the 2017 Tubbs fire, a Santa Rosa resident finally returned home to one of the handful of houses still standing amid a field of destruction. They turned on their kitchen faucet and smelled gasoline.It was an immediate red flag for Santa Rosa Water, which quickly sent over technicians to test the tap. In the water, they found benzene, a known carcinogen — a discovery that sent shockwaves through the scientific and water safety world.In Santa Rosa, the contamination investigation would expand from a single household to the entire burn area. The neighborhood of Coffey Park is leveled in October 2017 after the Tubbs fire swept through Santa Rosa. (Marcio Jose Sanchez / Associated Press) As devastating urban wildfires continued to increase in frequency in the American West, the problem would reappear — in Paradise, Calif.; in Colorado; in Hawaii; and finally in L.A.’s Pacific Palisades and Altadena. All the while, scientists, regulators and local utilities raced to figure out what was happening and how to keep residents safe.By the time the Eaton and Palisades fires broke out, scientists and the state could hand the affected utilities a playbook on how to restore safe water for their customers. The lessons learned helped the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which serves the Pacific Palisades, restore safe drinking water to all its customers just two months after the fires erupted — compared to an entire year in Santa Rosa.Yet, the Altadena utilities are still fighting to restore safe water. And, as with the Tubbs fire, the recovery has still been tinged with persisting scientific debates and uncomfortable unknowns.“We are in a sort of brave new world as we shift into this reality of increasingly more urban wildfires,” said Edith de Guzman, who researches water equity and climate adaptation policy at UCLA. “We have impacts that we’re not really even sure how to measure or monitor.”Benzene wasn’t the only contaminant in Santa Rosa’s and L.A.’s postfire water. Scientists are still debating which chemicals utilities ought to test for and which, given the costly and timely process of analyzing for dozens of chemicals, can go unchecked.And, while scientists have studied the danger of long-term exposure to trace amounts of contaminants like benzene in drinking water, less is known about the short-term risks of high exposures through day-to-day activities like showering and running the dish washer.The dangers of benzeneAfter the smoke settled in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, the local water utilities quickly issued “do not drink” and “do not boil” orders, under the advice of the state regulator — the State Water Resources Control Board’s Division of Drinking Water. Workers with the U.S Army Corps of Engineers clear debris from a house in Altadena after the Eaton fire. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The orders are designed to limit dangerous exposures to benzene, found in everything from plastic to treated construction wood to wildfire smoke. Over decades, drinking or breathing it in can increase the risk of developing leukemia and other blood cancers.While boiling water can kill off the typical non-fire contamination suspects, pathogens, it doesn’t work for benzene. And, with a lower boiling point than water, benzene can easily enter the air when water is heated up.Consequently, the state has developed best practices to keep residents safe, including not only avoiding drinking or boiling the water, but also avoiding hot showers, hot tubs and clothes dryers.However, scientists warn that these recommendations are not yet based on any comprehensive science. Reams of research link long-term small exposures of the contaminant to cancer risk. Few studies explore the potentials of short, intense household exposures.“Right now, there’s no chemical modeling, mathematical modeling or any exposure assessments that have been conducted to determine the answers to [these] questions,” said Andrew Whelton, a professor of civil environmental engineering at Purdue University and a leading researcher in the field of postfire water safety.In California, while the maximum allowed level of benzene in drinking water is 1 part per billion, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment says the concentration needs to be as low as 0.15 ppb to confidently say there will be no long-term chronic health effects. For the short-term, the Environmental Protection Agency deems exposure to over 200 ppb for longer than one day dangerous.In the aftermath of the recent fires, utilities in L.A. County have found levels as high as 190 ppb in Altadena and 71.3 ppb in the Palisades. However, after the Tubbs fire, Santa Rosa found levels as high as 40,000 ppb.After Santa Rosa Water first tested its customer’s kitchen faucet, the utility, along with the Division of Drinking Water and the EPA, launched a full investigation into the contamination of the drinking water of the affected area, and the results were unlike anything that had been seen before. A fire hose lies abandonded in Santa Rosa after the Tubbs fire in October 2017. (Jonathan Copper / Associated Press) “We did a lot of research in the start to see if any other agency had experienced this,” said Jennifer Burke, director of Santa Rosa Water. “We did not find anything anywhere.”What Santa Rosa Water found — not in the literature, but in its own backyard — was that a whole range of potentially dangerous chemicals lurked in the water. The discovery has helped guide post-wildfire recovery since.The other toxinsSanta Rosa Water first tried to figure out how a contaminant like benzene could’ve entered the water. The utility looked into whether nearby underground gasoline storage facilities could’ve been compromised, or if benzene was present in the soil, but found no compelling evidence. Then, a hypothesis emerged that would later be borne out in the lab and testing data from water systems postfire across the West.Parts of Santa Rosa’s water system had lost pressure during the blaze as firefighters tapped into hydrants, residents ran hoses to protect their properties and damaged connections spewed water into the street. As the water level dropped, leaving higher elevations dry, it created a void in the system. To fill the pressure void, experts theorized, the open connections began to suck toxic ash, soot and smoke into the pipes.It meant the contamination had the potential to quickly spread far beyond one home. 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Tuesday’s ruling is also a victory for Alito himself, who appears almost eager to rewrite the Clean Water Act more narrowly whenever the opportunity presents itself.At issue in the case is how the Clean Water Act—and, through it, the EPA—regulates offshore water pollution. The question is particularly important for San Francisco. Like many other major U.S. cities, it handles stormwater and wastewater through the same sewage system. That system is able to treat both types of water without issue under normal circumstances.When it rains or snows more than usual, however, the city’s sewer system discharges some of the overflow into the Pacific Ocean. That overflow typically consists of an untreated mixture of wastewater, stormwater, and various urban pollutants. That would violate the Clean Water Act, which generally prohibits the disposal of such pollutants into the nation’s waters.One of the EPA’s tools to combat water pollution under the Clean Water Act is to issue permits for facilities that routinely discharge pollutants into American waterways. Those permits allow the EPA to set certain requirements for would-be polluters to ensure that their outflows meet minimum safety and sanitary thresholds. In exchange for their compliance, permittees are immunized from public or private environmental lawsuits for the duration of the permit, relieving them of the expenses of litigation and short-term regulatory changes.San Francisco is challenging its current permit requirements on multiple grounds. The one that reached the high court in this particular case centered on what Alito called the permit’s “end-result requirements.” In addition to meeting certain minimum requirements at the outset, the EPA also can also levy penalties against permittees if the relevant body of water—which the court calls the “receiving waters”—falls below minimum quality standards.Alito concluded that the Clean Water Act gave the EPA no authority to impose such end-result requirements on would-be polluters. The law allows the agency to impose “any more stringent limitation” that is “necessary to meet” state and federal “water quality standards” established by law or by federal regulation. Alito argued that the term “limitation” only allowed restrictions before the fact, not afterward.“A provision that tells a permittee that it must do certain specific things plainly qualifies as a limitation,” he wrote. “Such a provision imposes a restriction ‘from without.’ But when a provision simply tells a permittee that a particular end result must be achieved and that it is up to the permittee to figure out what it should do, the direct source of restriction or restraint is the plan that the permittee imposes on itself for the purpose of avoiding future liability. In other words, the direct source of the restriction comes from within, not ‘from without.’”Barrett was not persuaded, to say the least. “Limitation,” she wrote, “is simply a synonym for ‘a restrictive condition.’” She noted that “limitations” based on end results were common in everyday life, like a college limiting scholarships to students who maintain a minimum GPA or an employer who limits bonuses to workers based on performance standards. The end-result requirements, Barrett explained, give “practical effect” to water-quality standards “by making them enforceable.”She also emphasized that the plaintiffs would still not be without options to challenge those conditions under her reading of the law. “There is no getting around it: The receiving water limitations are ‘limitations,’” she wrote. “If they are vague or unreasonable, they are vulnerable to challenge on one or both of those grounds. But even a vague or unreasonable limitation is still a ‘limitation.’”Barrett’s reference to Alito’s “broader policy concerns” when it comes to the Clean Water Act is a familiar one. Two years ago, in Sackett v. EPA, he wrote the majority opinion in a decision that sharply limited what types of wetlands count as the “waters of the United States,” the key term for the act’s jurisdiction. Alito held that only wetlands with a “continuous surface connection” to larger bodies of water fell under the Clean Water Act’s terms.In that instance, Justice Brett Kavanaugh dissented from the court’s new interpretation, which he argued was at odds with the statutory text. “The Court’s test narrows the Clean Water Act’s coverage of ‘adjacent’ wetlands to mean only ‘adjoining’ wetlands,” he wrote. “But ‘adjacent’ and ‘adjoining’ have distinct meanings.” Kavanaugh warned at length that the court’s misreading of the statutory text “will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States.”In a separate dissent, Justice Elena Kagan agreed with Kavanaugh and argued that Alito’s misreading of the law was driven by his own policy preferences. She pointed to his own phrasing choices that depicted the EPA as a heavy-handed brute and ordinary Americans as its hapless victims. “Congress, [Alito] scolds, has unleashed the EPA to regulate ‘swimming pools and puddles,’ wreaking untold havoc on ‘a staggering array of landowners,’” she wrote. “Surely something has to be done; and who else to do it but this court? It must rescue property owners from Congress’s too-ambitious program of pollution control.”As evidence of his policy views, Kagan cited Alito’s references to “crushing consequences” for those caught in the EPA’s web. Alito—perhaps intentionally, perhaps not—used the same adjective in Tuesday’s ruling. “When a permit contains such requirements,” he wrote in the San Francisco ruling, “a permittee that punctiliously follows every specific requirement in its permit may nevertheless face crushing penalties if the quality of the water in its receiving waters falls below the applicable standards.” (Emphasis mine.)Alito’s opinion only carries the force of law because four of his colleagues agreed to it. At the same time, the opinions in Sackett and San Francisco speak volumes about the court’s priorities and sympathies. Alito hypothesized at one point about a city that “devise[d] a careful plan” for water quality, “diligently implement[ed]” that plan, and still faced “dire potential consequences” if it failed. The EPA is presumed at every turn to be an onerous, malevolent creature; American cities and companies are well-meaning actors who humbly seek the regulatory relief that only the Supreme Court can offer. Alito and his colleagues are all too happy to provide it, even when the Clean Water Act itself doesn’t.

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