Building Momentum From First Wins to a Basin-Wide Strategy: 30-Year Anniversary
The first lease on Tumalo Creek moved 2.5 cfs back instream The first piping projects restored another 7.32. The concept had been proven, but the basin needed more.
Despite years of progress, the Deschutes Basin is still overallocated: more water has been promised than the river can naturally provide. This imbalance is most visible in the dry summer months, when stored water released to meet agricultural demand creates high flows above diversion points and critically low flows below them. Since there is no new water supply to unlock, meeting the needs of rivers, farms, and growing communities means scaling up these programs and participation across the basin.
Driven by ecological urgency, changing land use, and growing trust between the DRC and the irrigation districts, the programs that began as small experiments have steadily expanded into a basin-wide strategy.
The Basin’s Biggest Opportunity
At the turn of the century, irrigation accounted for more than 90 percent of the water diverted from the basin’s rivers and streams. That single fact defined where the greatest opportunity for conservation lay. If the effort was going to grow in scale to restore meaningful flows to rivers, partnering with the largest water users in the basin, the irrigation districts, would be critical.
Irrigation Modernization: A Creek Runs Again
The first piping projects in the Deschutes Basin, described in Chapter 2, proved that replacing open earthen canals with enclosed pipe could benefit both irrigators and the river at the same time. Irrigation districts gained more reliable delivery and lower maintenance costs, while water previously lost in transit no longer needed to be diverted from the river. Oregon’s Allocation of ConservedWater Statute, passed in 1987, provided the legal framework to permanently protect those savings instream, in exchange for the public dollars used to fund the projects.
What transformed this from a promising model into a basin-wide program was not only the strength of its design, but also a change in circumstance. In 1999, the listing of Middle Columbia River steelhead under the Endangered Species Act came with legal responsibilities and changed the equation for everyone with a stake in the basin's future.
Whychus Creek is a historically cold-water tributary of the Middle Deschutes that once supported robust populations of steelhead and other native fish. Over the course of a century, irrigation diversions dramatically reduced its flows with diversions of water often drying up the creek. The DRC worked alongside ThreeSisters Irrigation District, which fully depends on Whychus Creek for its water supply, to accelerate piping and on-farm modernization projects that would meet the new ESA requirements. The pace of work increased, and mile by mile of open canal was replaced with enclosed pipe. The water that had once been lost to seepage and evaporation now remains in the creek year-round to meet streamflow and habitat goals.
With the entire delivery system now nearly piped, Whychus Creek has achieved a minimum flow goal of 23 cfs in the summer. Increased flows are supporting habitat restoration efforts and anadromous fish reintroduction, and the creek is welcoming steelhead home for the first time in decades, supported by reintroduction efforts of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and PGE, and land conservation and habitat restoration work by the Deschutes Land Trust and the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council. The Whychus Creek story demonstrates what is possible when urgency aligns with the right tools, strong relationships, and partners committed to the same goal.
Today, every irrigation district in the Deschutes Basin participates in irrigation modernization projects. What began as a handful of early experiments has grown into a basin-wide program that is restoring streamflows and improving how water moves from the river to farms.
Market-Based Transactions: Returning Water to the River
The DRC's water leasing program offers irrigators a voluntary, flexible annual option: temporarily redirect their irrigation water to the river for the season, with the opportunity for compensation and preserving their water rights for future use. This flexibility makes leasing attractive to a wide range of irrigators and allows the DRC to respond to changing conditions across the basin year-to-year. Leasing participation has grown as the priorities of people with water rights have shifted over time and some irrigated lands have become urbanized. Partnerships with irrigation districts have also grown stronger leading to greater trust.
When the leasing program began in 1998, 584 acres were enrolled. Today the program averages 5000 acres, with participation across the basin. The most visible impact is at the footbridge in Sawyer Park, where up to25 percent of the flow passing beneath it on a summer day can be attributed to the leasing program. That growth reflects a genuine shift in how the basin's irrigators understand their relationship to the river.
Leasing provides flexible, renewable benefits. In contrast, water rights transfers offer a longer-term solution by permanently converting irrigation rights back to protected instream flow. The rapid growth of CentralOregon created an opportunity when agricultural lands converted to urban development starting in the mid-2000s. Irrigation rights could be moved to other lands or protected instream.
At the same time, new development was increasing demand for groundwater. Recognizing the connection between surface water and groundwater,Oregon's Deschutes Basin Mitigation Program, established by the state in 2003, required that an equivalent volume of water be restored instream to offset new groundwater uses. Permanent instream transfers create credits that allow developers and municipalities to meet those requirements. Of the 51 cfs protected at Sawyer Park by permanent transfers, 92% created permanent mitigation credits. 35 percent of the summer flows in the Deschutes below Bend is a result of permanent transfers. The DRC has a state-chartered mitigation bank that provides annual credits (from a portion of the instream leasing) to groundwater users when they can’t find permanent credits.
Collaborative Planning: Seeing the Whole System
By the late 2000s, it became clear that individual projects, however well-executed, could not address the basin's deeper, systemic challenges. Nowhere was this more visible than in the Upper Deschutes below Wickiup Reservoir, where decades of water storage and irrigation management had inverted the river's natural rhythm. Winter months left the river running low, while artificially high summer releases sent flood-level flows through 76 miles of river channel only to be diverted at the north end of Bend into irrigation canals, dropping flows once again. The resulting flow fluctuations disconnected floodplains, accelerated bank erosion, and degraded the habitat that fish and wildlife depend on.
The urgency to act was heightened when the Oregon spotted frog, a species whose survival depends on the stable, year-round flows that were largely lost in the Upper Deschutes, was listed under the Endangered Species Act in 2014. What had been a conservation priority became a legal and ecological imperative.
Understanding and solving this challenge required something the basin had not yet attempted:a comprehensive look at how water was stored, managed, and delivered across the entire system. The Upper Deschutes Basin Study, a three-year process, provided clear findings. There is enough water to meet basin needs, and the pieces of a comprehensive solution exist, but success can only be achieved if diverse interests work together toward a common goal.
The Deschutes Basin Water Collaborative grew from the Basin Study, building on the relationships and momentum the DRC and its partners had spent decades establishing. It brought the Tribes, irrigators, municipalities, state and federal agencies, and conservation organizations together around a shared planning process. The goal was to establish a common framework for understanding the full scope of the challenge and coordinating stakeholder responses across the Middle and Upper Deschutes Rivers. It was guided by the same mission the DRC has held since its founding for restored streamflows and improved water quality but now pursued at the scale the problem required.
Zooming Out: The Need for a Basin-Wide View
The Collaborative was a significant step, but its scope was specific to the upper and middle reaches of the Deschutes. The river flows beyond that, and so do its challenges. Water quality and quantity in the Crooked River, flow issues in Trout Creek, and the downstream needs of communities throughout the basin point toward a broader planning view that is still taking shape. Understanding the basin as a whole system and managing its upper reaches in balance with the needs of the lower basin, remains one of the defining challenges ahead.
That broader view is particularly important when considering the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, whose 11,000 square miles of ceded ancestral lands encompass much of the basin and whose relationship to the water extends back to time immemorial, long before modern water management. For the Tribes, the health of the river is inseparable from culture, identity, and represents a responsibility to descendants seven generations into the future.
Working toward balance across the whole basin is essential for every community, farm, and river reach in Central Oregon, and it is a responsibility that belongs to everyone who calls this place home.
Community Engagement: The Work Behind the Work
Most of the work of water conservation happens out of public view. Contract negotiations, legal transactions, data analysis, engineering projects: all of it necessary, almost none of it visible to the people who live in the basin, fish its rivers, and depend on its flow every day.
The DRC recognized early on that this carries a cost. A community that does not understand the challenges the rivers face will not be equipped to support the needed solutions. Through public outreach, community events, and storytelling, the DRC has worked for 30 years to close that gap, grounded in the belief that durable change requires that everyone be part of the story.
Years ago, the health of the river was largely a concern for biologists and irrigators, not everyday conversation. Today, as drought years come with greater frequency and rivers run lower through the summer months, that has changed. People notice. They expect water to be in the river and farms to have what they need, and they are increasingly aware that those two things rise and fall together.An aware community that understands what is at stake becomes an important part of making that work possible.
The Programs That Built a System of Streamflow Restoration
Described separately, the DRC’s programs can seem like distinct efforts. In practice, they function as a single, integrated response to a connected set of challenges. Irrigation modernization generates water savings that are permanently protected in the river under state law. Market-based transactions return additional water to instream flow through voluntary arrangements with irrigators and water rights holders. Basin-wide planning identifies where those efforts will produce the greatest benefit and coordinates action at the scale the system demands. And community engagement ensures that the people of the basin understand what is at stake, why the work matters, and support the effort.
The connection between infrastructure and leasing runs deeper than it might first appear. As piping projects modernize delivery systems across a district, irrigators gain more flexibility in how they manage their water, expanding the pool of those who are eligible to participate in the annual leasing program and transfers. Every mile of canal piped directly protects water instream and makes the market-based programs more effective over time.
Each program reinforces the others, builds on what came before, and reflects the organizing values that have guided the DRC since its founding: voluntary and collaborative.
Thirty Years in the Making
The programs described in this chapter were not all designed at once. They were built incrementally, tested against real conditions, and scaled to meet the demands and values of the time. The first lease, the first piping project, the first reach that flowed all summer long after years of being drained dry—these were the building blocks of a system that, thirty years later, is changing the way water is managed in the Deschutes Basin.
Yes, the basin is still over allocated, and climate change and a growing population continue to add pressure. But the work is not finished. The framework for accelerating that work now exists in a way it simply did not in 1992: the partnerships, the tools, the planning infrastructure, and a community that values and understands why it matters.
This is the result of thirty years of effort, staying at the table, and choosing a path that prioritizes cooperation over conflict and long-term thinking over short-term convenience. The proof of concept grew into a set of programs, the programs grew into a strategy, and the strategy has improved the river, which will continue to evolve as new challenges emerge. What the river looks like, reach by reach and year by year, is the next part of the story.
Click to Read Chapter 1: How Collaboration Became the Path Forward
Click to Read Chapter 2: Proof of Concept: The First Wins That Changed Everything
