Environmentalists who are fighting for the repair or removal of Winchester Dam in Douglas County recently met with Gov. Tina Kotek’s office, according to a state senator.
Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, mentioned the meeting during Wednesday’s meeting of the Senate Interim Committee On Natural Resources and Wildfire, which he chairs.
FILE — Construction crews working at Winchester Dam near Roseburg on Aug. 7, 2023. Crews were lowering water above the dam to prepare to make repairs on the privately owned dam.
Erik Neumann/JPR
Golden mentioned it in the context of a letter that was sent to the governor’s office and himself. In that letter, 10 conservation and fishing groups laid out a timeline of events and accused the dam’s owner, the Winchester Water Improvement District, of using the legal system to drag its feet on repairs and improvements that have been ordered by various agencies.
“I think everybody recognizes that the rights of the district who own the dam to litigation tools and defense make this really difficult,” said Golden. “But the theme of this letter is that there are things that can be done even so to resolve this.”
Kotek’s office did not return KLCC’s email seeking confirmation of the meeting in time for this story.
Another member of the committee, Sen. Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene, concurred with the letter and Golden.
“There’s a lot of landowners in that area that basically have a private lake to go skiing or whatever else they want to do, and it has decimated the fisheries in that area,” Prozanksi said.
Prozanski added that “instead of doing the right thing and putting in a fish passage that works and doing things that will co-exist with everyone, they’re continuing to use the legal system — I’m an attorney, I got it, I understand that — to basically delay and delay.”
KLCC obtained a copy of the letter, and it outlines a long-running battle over updates that the district was ordered to complete as far back as 2016.
“Since 2025, elective actions by the Oregon’s dam safety officials have delayed appropriate enforcement advancing necessary repairs at Winchester Dam,” the letter stated.
The dam has been subject to multiple legal actions since an attempted repair in 2018. The fight increased after a 2023 event that killed an estimated 550,000 juvenile lamprey.
Winchester Water Control District and other dam-related entities face a number of fines for various incidents involving the maintenance of the dam, most notably a $23.7 million fine for the lamprey kill. It has also been ordered to update the dam’s salmon ladder by 2030.
In August, Terra Firma Foundation Repair, a company owned by WWCD’s chair Ryan Beckley that is often a co-defendant in legal actions by the state, filed amended counterclaims against the state for at least $80 million alleging a vindictive conspiracy by the state to force WWCD to remove the dam.
Zac Ziegler is a reporter with the KLCC newsroom. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
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