East Improvement District dedicates $50M East Project
UMATILLA — More than six decades after regulators first documented groundwater declines in Umatilla and Morrow counties, the East Project irrigation system was dedicated before a crowd of about two dozen along the Columbia River on Tuesday, May 11.
The more than $50 million project aims to provide farmers with river water in lieu of pumping from the ground in an effort to recharge depleted aquifers and allow farmers to grow higher value crops.
“It wouldn’t be possible unless there was a lot of people supporting it, and then the benefits are going to be broad,” said Carl St. Hilaire, president of JSH Farms in Hermiston. “Just as the support was broad, the benefits will be broad in terms of economic benefits for the entire community.”
St. Hilaire is the district chairman of the East Improvement District, the public entity created to build and operate the East Project. The district was created by 13 landowners and spans 26,500 irrigated acres.
“I think the main thing is it’s kind of a miracle that the stakeholders could get together and agree on promoting a project,” St. Hilaire said.
While the improvement district was founded to take advantage of $7 million in state funding, that left the landowners on the hook for the remainder of the projected $46 million price tag. With no credit history in the district’s name, landowners committed the remainder of the funding in equity and debt service.
“I think 75 to 80% of our budget was financed and therefore we need to use the water over as many acres as possible so we can keep our debt service cost down and get things paid for,” St. Hilaire said.
Despite the financing woes, St. Hilaire said he and others are excited for the opportunity to be done with construction and focus on the farming and water mitigation aspects of the project.
“The issue for farming operations is we need the water but we don’t need the distraction of a construction project,” said St. Hilaire.”The other issue is we want to fully utilize the asset, so that means we’re going to pursue a full set of mitigation water.”
Decades in the making
Among those who spoke at the dedication was Rep. Bobby Levy, R-Echo, who used the opportunity to outline the decades-long process that led to the East Project. Levy, whose husband’s farm is among those in the East Project’s distribution area, explained that in 1954, just one year after she was born, the Bureau of Reclamation made a determination that the irrigable land in the Umatilla River watershed exceeded available groundwater supply. She went on to outline various milestones that led to the East Project.
“What makes this project so unique is the level of commitment and decades of collaboration, trust building and compromise that lead to our ability to be here today,” she said.
Levy said the water projects are something the state needs to commit to in the years to come and not forget that the true scope of the project has yet to be completed. She added that she has submitted a $6 million funding request to fund the Ordnance Project, the third of three water projects proposed in 2015 that include the East Project and West Project, which was completed in May 2020.
Levy extended her thanks to U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Oregon Sens. Bill Hansell, R-Athena, and Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, for securing $11 million in funding for the East and West projects in 2015, members of the Oregon Water Resources Division, the CTUIR and several other agencies for their continued negotiations and cooperation.
Higher value crops
Although the primary goal of the project is to allow for the recharge of aquifers in the Columbia Basin, the increase in consistent water supply will allow farmers in the region to grow higher value crops, such as onions, potatoes and other produce that yield higher dollar returns per acre.
St. Hilaire said that the sandy soil and dry climate requires a lot of water to grow crops, but when water is plentiful these factors make for perfect conditions.
“The soil type and the climate over here are extremely dry and it requires a lot of water to grow things,” he said. “On the flip side, if you have water there are a lot of different types of high-value crops you can grow.”
St. Hilaire said farmers have been hurt in recent years by low commodity prices, and that the ability to switch to higher value crops not only helps farms but also the local economy.
“Water is the critical resource, so for us it means the possibility of farming some high-value crops, including organic, and having a consistent source of water for them,” he said.
All of these advancements in farming would not be possible without an efficient means of transporting the water from the Columbia River.
Technological advancements aid efficiency
Fred Ziari, president of Hermiston-based IRZ Consulting, said of the thousands of irrigation projects his company has completed in all corners of the globe, the East Project ranked at the top in both design complexity and technological advancements.
“We’ve done thousands of designs all over the world,” he said. “This is by far the most advanced system that we have ever designed and built.”
For this, Ziari credits not only his staff, but the farmers behind the project who he said prioritized technology and efficiency throughout the project. Ziari said the main pumping station and the booster pumps at each outlet are managed remotely and can be monitored for function and flow rate from a cellphone.
“We had foresight from the farmers,” he said. “They didn’t want to shortchange the system, so they wanted the highest level of technology that is totally controlled and measured 24/7.”
Ziari added that each pump has a variable-frequency drive allowing it to scale quickly to the needed flow rate. The pumping station is capable of moving up to 100,000 gallons per minute at peak operation.
Moving that amount water is no small feat; the pumping station, located 7 miles east of McNary on the Columbia River, utilizes 19,000 horsepower worth of pumps to carry the water out of the station in an 84-inch diameter pipe and across roughly 8 miles over a 500-foot elevation gain.
“It was a labor of love from our side,” Ziari said.
In addition to technologically advanced mechanical equipment, Ziari credits the use of fiberglass reinforced pipe (FRP) with keeping costs down and increasing the efficiency of the design.
“First, its 35% cheaper than steel and second, it has tremendous energy efficiency,” he said. “I would have needed to add an additional 3,500 horsepower if I had steel pipe rather than this FRP.”
Next steps
For Northeast Oregon Water Association Director J.R. Cook, the dedication was both a celebration of how far the project has come and a reminder of how far they have to go.
“What we’ve been trying to remind people is this is just the cornerstone,” he said. “Now we’ve got the mitigation program, we’ve got to get the groundwater savings program done and we have a huge project in the Ordnance pipeline that needs to be finished.”
Cook said the past few years have been a constant struggle to keep everyone up to date with the project and its purpose. In addition to transitions in Salem, he said he has had to ensure that a new generation of landowners within the land base are brought up to speed on the process as well.
“What made this work was commitments that we don’t just use these projects to go squirt a bunch more water on, grow a bunch more vegetables and make more money,” he said. “It had to be a uniform effort of mitigated water, groundwater saving all of the additional benefits than just the financial side.”
Cook said it’s important to keep up with the pace after the completion of the pumping station and target that energy into the mitigation and groundwater savings that made it possible. He added that the process that brought everyone to Tuesday is worth recognizing as well.
“The farmers are the ones that wrote the check and made it happen, but it’s the generations of representatives, and like Bobby (Levy) said – the whole process itself – is what made this happen,” said Cook. “We get to be here celebrating the results of it but we need to kind of celebrate the process a little bit too.”