As communities downstream of Detroit Lake prepare for horrific dam drawdowns, I want to share some perspective with my old neighbors based on my work as a city administrator in Linn County when this whole process began in 2023. I recently read a quote Rep. Ed Diehl provided to the Statesmen Journal about the topic, addressing court orders for the US Army Corps of Engineers to drain reservoirs:
“I feel better than I did when this was originally proposed,” state Rep. Ed Diehl, R-Stayton, said. “I feel like they’ve learned from what happened at Green Peter and are handling this better. But I still have a lot of concerns because that filtration system is so delicate and if they have to shut it down, there’s no backup for Stayton.”
During the 2023-2024 drawdown season, I was the City Administrator/Recorder of Sodaville, a town south of the South Santiam River that was painfully affected by the Green Peter and Foster dam drawdowns. Sodaville’s water comes from fissures rather than aquifers, and water availability is highly dependent on the regional water table. Every fall for a few decades, the fissures provide less far water than normal and the City has to truck water into town that was purchased from Lebanon. While we did some excellent work building infrastructure that resulted in better conservation in 2022, the dam drawdowns during the 2023-2024 winter season resulted in such a collapse in the water supply that it decimated the City’s budget.
In order to pay for the cost of massively increased water hauling needs, the City spent nearly $100k, well in excess of the originally $60k budgeted. The prior year, conservation efforts had put water hauling costs in the $30k range, and if not for the dam drawdowns, they would likely have stayed that low. Finding the money to pay for these hauling costs came at a highly personal cost. I had to cut my own hours and paycheck and find additional part-time work outside the City to pay for water. I had to work without heat during the entire winter season as well, which made the job far more difficult, but it was worth providing for my community’s residents. The impact on Lebanon was harsh as well, as the City had to put so much chlorine in the water to make it safe for consumption that my tapwater tasted like a public pool.
During this process, the litigants who forced this ecological catastrophe proved just as ambivalent to Sodaville’s trouble as the Army Corps of Engineers. At a town hall in Sweet Home, residents raged over water quality and scarcity, and the litigants said meh, let the Army Corps pay for it. The disastrous consequences of their vexatious litigation was someone else’s problem, not theirs. Later in the season at a community leaders meeting with the Army Corps, I was asked why Sodaville was not briefed about the forthcoming impacts to the water table. The Army Corps response was similarly underwhelming: There were a few town halls in another town we didn’t notify you about that you could have attended. The blame for not being prepared for a man-made ecological catastrophe was placed squarely on a community that suffered, and the Army Corps ultimately made it very clear that cities who suffered were not anywhere on their list of priorities. At the very least, they could have scheduled a meeting with me in City Hall, but apparently they expected me as a city manager to come to them for details about plans that were kept hidden from me.
I appreciate Rep. Diehl has looked into the situation, and it appears that the Army Corps has assuaged his potential concerns. However, I need to warn Marion County residents that the litigants who inspired this anthropogenic disaster are bad faith actors and the Army Corps prioritizes painful ambivalence towards impacted communities. I fully expect the approaching drawdowns to have similarly horrific impacts on Marion County water consumers, because the people in charge simply do not care who is impacted. With all deliberate speed, I encourage community leaders and residents to contact the White House and ask President Trump as the commander in chief to stop the Army Corps from moving forward, because the litigants will do whatever it takes to ensure that our military’s resources are deployed to harm US citizens, and the Army Corps will not push back one iota to protect Americans.
The City of Stayton has excellent resources on their website empowering citizens to join their municipal government in fighting for their community. I encourage Stayton residents and Marion County community members to contact all elected officials possible to push back against what is guaranteed to be a tragic assault on the ecological vitality of the region. People can also email comments regarding the drawdowns directly to willamette.eis@usace.army.mil pushing back against the Detroit Lake drawdown through January 13, 2026.
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