A view of city hall in North Powder, Ore., on July 7, 2026, after a city council meeting where leaders discussed a state fine over wastewater reporting.
Monica Carrillo-Casas / OPB
A northeastern Oregon town is facing another state penalty over failing to monitor its wastewater.
At a city council meeting on July 7, leaders of North Powder said the town is working to get back in compliance with state law in the coming weeks. They blamed a lapse in local leadership for an $11,000 fine levied by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality in May.
This isn’t the first time the state has dinged the city of about 500 residents over water issues that regulators say could lead to environmental damage. North Powder is a remote community in Union County, but its water struggles are hardly an outlier in the state. Across rural Oregon, managing old municipal water systems amid tight city budgets is a recurring problem, said state Sen. Todd Nash, a Republican from Enterprise.
“The aging infrastructure that we see across the board in Oregon and the inability for a lot of these small cities and even large cities to be able to absorb the cost to upgrade their systems — it’s a staggering situation right now,” said Nash, who represents North Powder in the legislature.
Some 58 Oregon municipalities were concerned about replacing aging water infrastructure, a 2021 survey by Portland State University researchers found. Nearly half of those cities anticipated needing to rebuild wastewater treatment facilities that can cost millions, or even billions each, according to the survey commissioned by the Oregon League of Cities.
North Powder Mayor Alan Brown said in an interview with OPB that his city also needs to update its water and sewer systems, but it will need state and federal grants to do that, and short staffing has made it difficult to even apply.
“The grant money is available. It’s just finding the window of time,” Brown said. He recalled taking on one grant application himself, “and it took me 62 hours of just sitting down and making phone calls and getting that across the finish line.”
North Powder will be working with a contractor to meet state wastewater monitoring requirements over the next two weeks, said its recently-hired Public Works Director Don McClure.
“This came to my attention about a month ago, and I was panicked,” said McClure, who’s also a city council member. “We had a real rough year for turnover last year.”
He said a former city employee who was responsible for the reporting requirements failed to follow through. After taking the job earlier this year though, McClure said he recognized a pattern of disorganization stretching back decades.
“The public works office looked like a bomb went off and it’d been that way for 25 years,” he said. “You open a drawer and it was just a stash of papers and letters and stuff that made no difference to anybody in the world.”
Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality first intervened in North Powder in 2019, state records show, when the city signed an agreement with the state setting requirements to upgrade its wastewater treatment systems and bring the city back into compliance.
However, four years later, in November 2023, the town was fined nearly $12,000 for permit violations. The state said the city had exceeded limits for E. coli bacteria and failed to collect monitoring data about accumulated solids in its wastewater lagoons. North Powder extended its agreement with DEQ that same year to continue working toward upgrading the wastewater system. DEQ spokesperson Carisma Sanchez confirmed that work has since been completed, and city records show the state reduced the fine.
The state often reduces fines for companies and governments if they agree to make changes and mitigate environmental impacts. North Powder could submit a plan to do this again, Sanchez said in an email, but for now, “the penalty has not been reduced or waived.”
