How community forest management can help Oregon cities protect their drinking water

Several communities in Oregon have bought portions of their surrounding forests to more directly manage their natural resources. The “community forest” model has been used to manage for wildfire risk, drinking water quality, recreation and more. The Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board recently awarded grants to six cities to protect forests around their drinking water sources. The funding allows them to purchase land, arrange for conservation easements and pay back debt on property they’ve already acquired within their watershed.

We’ll hear more from Ann Vileisis, mayor of Port Orford, which received one of the grants. We’ll also learn about community forests more broadly from Dylan Kruse, president of the conservation nonprofit Sustainable Northwest.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Several communities in Oregon have bought portions of their surrounding forests to more directly manage their natural resources. This community forest model has been used to manage for wildfire risk, habitat and recreation. It’s also a way for communities to protect their sources of drinking water. The Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board recently awarded grants to six cities to do just that. Port Orford is one of those cities. Ann Vileisis is the mayor of Port Orford. She joins us now, along with Dylan Kruse, the president of the conservation nonprofit Sustainable Northwest. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.

Dylan Kruse: Thanks, Dave. How are you doing?

Ann Vileisis: It’s great to be here.

Miller: Doing very well. Thanks for joining us. Ann Vileisis, I want to start with the basics. Where does the city of Port Orford get its drinking water?

Vileisis: We get our drinking water from a small stream, the North Fork of Hubbard Creek, that flows down from coastal mountains not far outside of our town into a small reservoir. That’s our sole source of water. So we have become very aware of the importance of our drinking water source area.

Miller: Can you tell us what happened to the city’s watershed back in the 1990s?

Vileisis: Yeah, basically, the first chapter in the story is, way back then, we had a piece of land in our drinking water source area get logged off. And there was a big landslide that was precipitated in association with that that pretty much cut off our water supply or made our drinking water supply unusable. We had to shift to a different source for a year, at huge cost and difficulty. It was before I lived here, so I’ve only heard the stories from other people.

That story, that experience, I think catalyzed in our community this awareness of the importance of our drinking watershed. And our local watershed council, which was formed around that time, got interested in figuring out how to start buying the land in our watershed. So after that parcel was logged, we were able to buy it up. A few years later, there was sort of another situation like that where we were able to buy another piece of land after it was logged.

Miller: Just to go back, when you said that after it was logged in the ‘90s, then there was a landslide, which meant that for a year you had to use an alternate water supply at great cost and difficulty. It’s the residents of Port Orford who had to take that cost?

Vileisis: Yes, I mean, I don’t know all the details honestly, because it was before my time. But basically, we’re a very small water system. We only have about 700 users in the water system. So when we have big things that happen to us, we can get ourselves into big water emergencies where we either need help or we have to figure out how to solve it.

Miller: How did that prior experience inform the community’s response to proposed logging in the watershed just a few years ago?

Vileisis: Well, basically, I think we kind of knew when we realized that there was going to be the logging of 160 acres just upstream of our reservoir that we had to do something. In short, our local watershed council, there had been another logging happening nearby, and they reached out to the company and said, hey, can we have an extra wide buffer? And it was through that conversation of just saying, hey, we need help and we need your help to make sure our drinking water is not damaged – they were the ones that alerted us that the next logging was slated.

So that started a really important conversation. And initially it began, as I said, with our watershed council volunteers figuring out what the options might be, and bringing it to the city and city council at that time as a very urgent matter. Because basically, what we realized is taking proactive action, buying the watershed ahead of time so we have control over what happens, is more cost effective and a better approach than waiting to see what happens if there is logging or other kinds of disruptions that could impact the highly erodible soils in our coast range areas.

Miller: You’re a city of about 1,100 people. How were you able to buy a 160-acre parcel of forest land on short notice?

Vileisis: It was a huge challenge. But the great news and the amazing thing is that so many people seem to jump in to help us. As I mentioned, the watershed council started by just calling and saying, what can we do? How do we do this? Help, help. And we had help from our local land trust. We had help from state agencies. Slowly but surely we started piecing together a path that entailed getting an appraisal for the land and finding what’s called a bridge buyer, which in our case was the conservation fund, a larger conservation group that does this kind of thing. They help communities buy land and they can jump in and do the sale, and it gave the city time to figure out how we can line up funding to buy it.

So that was the general approach. When they bought it, we were also working … the city got more involved. We started working with the state [and] were able to get a DEQ clean water revolving fund loan. That helped us to buy the land from the conservation fund. The land cost about $800,000. Half of that loan was forgivable through that program. But for a very small town, having a debt of $400,000 is still a big deal. So that’s where the other grant came in.

We just are so fortunate to have received an OWEB – Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board – grant through their new drinking water protection program that is going to help us to pay off the rest of the loan. Which is absolutely crucial because little towns don’t have the resources to do that. And yet, as I mentioned, if we hadn’t been able to do that, we would have had a big emergency on our hands, very likely a much bigger problem.

Miller: So as I mentioned, Dylan Kruse is with us as well, the president of Sustainable Northwest. Dylan, just to take a step back, what is a community forest?

Kruse: Thanks, Dave. That’s a great question and I think Mayor Vileisis gave a really good example of that. There’s no one-size-fits-all policy on community forests, but the bottom line is it’s about community members, the city, the individuals that live there having more say in how forests are being managed. And what we often see is that a community forest is managed for a number of values and goals. So it might be timber, it might be recreation, it might be wildfire protection. And in this case, and increasingly, it’s protecting drinking water. So it’s having more say in that, protecting those sources from multiple values and making sure that the community gets all the great benefits that forests provide.

Miller: How common are community forests in Oregon or in the Northwest right now?

Kruse: Yeah, it’s hot. We’re seeing a lot more of this in the Pacific Northwest. So Oregon has about 15 community forests and a handful more in development. Across the Pacific Northwest as a whole, probably around 40 or 50. This is a model we’ve seen in Europe, internationally. On the East Coast, they’re pretty common, called town forests. But in recent years, as we’ve dealt with a lot of these natural resource challenges and conflicts, community forests are increasingly seen as a great solution here in Oregon and Washington.

Miller: Why do you think there has been this increase?

Kruse: Well, I think that, as Mayor Vileisis was saying, if you want to have the most cost effective solution to these challenges, if you want to manage for a diverse suite of outcomes and you want a permanent fix to a controversial issue, the best bet is to just keep the resource intact in the first place, right? And we’re seeing a lot more of these pressures with climate change, with drought, with wildfire, changes in management practices, conversion, different land use, even seasonality like on the coast. We think of it as being this very wet place. It’s got a lot of drought. And when you have a lot of tourists that come in the summertime, it really hammers those drinking water systems and we’re not aware of it.

So, communities are basically saying, look, I’ve got a natural solution right here in my forest. Let’s just work with what we have to use that sponge to capture the water, to clean our water, to protect our communities, rather than risk losing this and then having to put in really expensive water treatment facilities or to do fire recovery on the back end. [That] can cost tens of millions of dollars rather than just working with the natural solution right in front of us.

Miller: As we were talking with Mayor Vileisis, the focus has been on what’s in this for cities and for residents, and what it takes to piece together a deal. But in order for this to work, the landowner needs to be a willing seller. What are those conversations like and what’s in this for an owner of timberlands who’s used to making their money from cutting down their trees?

Kruse: This is what I love about this solution and this is what Sustainable Northwest does. We will partner with cities, with communities like Port Orford, and we’ll work with other groups like land trusts and funders to identify those goals and to say, look, we have a parcel that may be available or is available. What do we want to get out of this? What do we want to achieve? How much does it cost? How do we buy it? How do we finance it and how do we manage it? We put that plan together to make it happen more quickly and effectively because it’s tough to do. It’s expensive. It’s complex. And those are the kinds of solutions we provide.

What I have seen and observed is that increasingly, landowners and the forest products industry are actually coming to the table a lot more and are willing to work with communities in this space, because look, they live, they work there, their employees work there. They all care about their drinking water as well. So this is a really nice way for us to identify strategic properties within the drinking watershed, put a little bit more of a protection on that to make sure we’ve got clean water or fire protection and other values we care about, and then we can continue to manage the rest of the resource base, which is good for the jobs in the local economy.

So we’ve actually got this real sweet spot of bipartisan support and alignment, where everybody’s on the same page and saying this is a no-brainer. Let’s get this permanent fix. And I’ve seen those landowners increasingly coming to the table and giving a lot of these cities that first option and choice to buy the property, because they know how important it is.

Miller: Is it fair to say that in this case, a 160-acre parcel is crucial for the Port Orford watershed or an equivalent in some other place, but it’s not maybe a huge chunk of the overall holdings that some of these landowners might have? They’re fine holding on to the rest of the timber lands for timber and then selling this because it’s less important overall. I mean, is that part of the thinking here? I’m still trying to figure out how this fits into the business model of somebody whose overall goal is making money from land over the course of 30- or 50-year cycles.

Kruse: I think that’s fair, Dave. And it’s a market price. These cities are paying a fair market price on this. But for a lot of the very large landowners that we work with, especially along the Oregon coast, yeah, they have huge land holdings in the tens or hundreds of thousands of acres. So if you’re dealing with a small community that is basically saying, “hey, these couple hundred acres are really important to us,” that’s a much easier conversation than saying we need to change the laws, we need to overhaul the system. We’re going to pursue eminent domain in court. Nobody wants to go through this. So if we can come to the table and say, “here’s a fair price for an important piece of land that matters to us, to the community, everyone agrees on and we’re not going to fight about this anymore,” that’s where we’re starting to see that sweet spot and that solution.

Then for a lot of small landowners that might just have a property that’s going to be developed, they just care about the community and they’re saying, “I know this isn’t the drinking watershed. I’m going to give you guys some time to figure this out. If you can put the pieces together and raise the funds, I want to make sure we buy it and we protect this place that I care about too.” So you see a lot of that community involvement and people coming to the table with good interests in mind because, again, we all care about our forests, we care about our communities and we all want clean drinking water.

Vileisis: And that’s why we were really fortunate to have a willing landowner who really wanted to work with us and understood how important it was for our community. And nobody wants to damage a small town’s water source, so I think it was really a great win-win.

Miller: Mayor Vileisis, what lessons do you hope that other communities in Oregon can take away from your experience?

Vileisis: Well, I think starting out, the prospect of figuring out how to do this all seemed quite overwhelming because small towns don’t have a lot of capacity. We don’t have expertise in land deals, real estate, timber and all that kind of stuff. So to have so many partners step up and help us, like Sustainable Northwest, other NGOs and state agencies along the way, was just so heartening. People really helped us to build out the path to make it happen because we understood the cost effectiveness of this solution and how important it was. So anyway, that was truly heartening.

So I would say, any community that wants to do this, I think you can find help to keep going and make it happen. And if you don’t know how, just reach out and you will find the help.

Miller: Dylan, as we heard from Ann earlier, the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board got state funding to support communities like hers. That was in the 2023-2025 legislative session. What happened with the push for funding in the latest session?

Kruse: Unfortunately, we didn’t get there – and that was a miss. In 2023, we were able to secure $5 million. We saw funding go to five communities to buy their watersheds. We saw some additional loan forgiveness. And that money is leveraged, in some cases, 4-to-1 by the federal government and other sources. So, tens of millions of additional dollars are coming into Oregon for this, because we’re able to put a fairly modest amount on the table, again, for public safety, for health, for environmental and economic benefit.

I gotta tell you, I know there were a lot of demands in the 2025 session and a lot of things that we need to fund, but it was really unfortunate that we were unable to get there. We had some strong advocates making the case for this. But ultimately, we walked away without making it funded. So we are going to be back in 2026. We appreciate the chance to raise awareness about this program here with you all on Think Out Loud. We gotta be telling our legislators that we’ve got to fund this program.

It’s not just the coast. It’s projects across Oregon. We’ve done work in The Dalles, Rhododendron. Baker City had an application. Almost half of the state’s population gets their drinking water from surface flows, so you can kind of get a feel for the magnitude of this issue and how important it is. It’s a no-brainer. Things get very, very expensive quickly when we start talking about treatment facilities and trying to address water storage. We have to protect our natural resources and our forests first, and this is a bipartisan, nonpartisan, easy fix right in front of us right now that is already working. So we need to see the state legislature step back up and fund this program again as soon as possible.

Miller: Ann Vileisis, before we say goodbye … In the next segment, we’re going to be talking about the loss of a FEMA grant for a water system for a community in Lane County. But I understand that Port Orford was also going to get money from this federal program that was abruptly canceled. What was that money going to go towards and what does this mean?

Vileisis: Well, we were actually in the running. We hadn’t quite gotten it yet, but I knew we were going to get it because we did so well on our applications. We’d made a lot of progress and we were in the final stages. That was gonna go for our water distribution system.

I’ve come to understand, we’ve got kind of the green infrastructure in our watersheds and the gray infrastructure. And right now, our country and lots of our cities are really facing the challenge of deteriorating infrastructure on a high scale. A lot of it was put in like 50 years ago with the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act,. And now we really need fixes and little communities don’t have the resources to do it on our own. So that was a real blow; we’re really disappointed.

Miller: Ann Vileisis and Dylan Kruse, thanks very much.

Kruse: Thanks so much for the opportunity, Dave. We appreciate you.

Vileisis: Yeah, thank you. Bye-bye.

Miller: Ann Vileisis is the mayor of Port Orford on Oregon’s South Coast. Dylan Kruse is the president of Sustainable Northwest.

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