In his campaign to become Oregon’s top water official, Ivan Gall’s long tenure in state government turned out to be an asset as well as a liability.

According to supporters, Gall’s decades of experience at the Oregon Water Resources Department will shorten the process of familiarizing himself with the agency’s complex workings.

Detractors didn’t believe the time he spent climbing the ladder at OWRD would serve water users, claiming that Gall’s role in the agency’s decision-making contributed to its dysfunction.

Now that his appointment as OWRD’s director has been ratified by lawmakers, Gall says the rancor of his confirmation process attests to the “passion and concern” about the state’s waters.

“I had a number of legislators on both sides of the aisle indicate to me not to take it personally,” he said. “I’ve been in the game long enough where that’s kind of standard practice.”

From Gall’s perspective, his quarter-century at OWRD is more nuanced than a talking point, as it spans his evolving job junctions, broader scientific advances and regulatory changes within the agency — including those with which he’s disagreed.

“I wasn’t 100% satisfied with some of the policy calls that the department was making over the years,” Gall said. “I felt if I was going to be an influencer to change those, it was important to get into management and gain a better understanding of our legislative process and the political process.”

Interest in water

As a youngster, Gall and his friends would pan for gold in the mountains surrounding his hometown of Ashland, Ore., which necessitated a familiarity with the streams and river systems of the region.

Originally intending to pursue oceanography, Gall switched gears after discovering a proclivity for sea sickness, combining his earlier interests to obtain a graduate degree specializing in hydrogeology.

After joining OWRD, he rose to take charge of groundwater section and then its field services division before serving as interim deputy director.

If assuming a more prominent leadership role as director means becoming a bigger lightning rod for criticism, Gall said he accepts that as part of the bargain.

“I really love the science and I still have a tough time pulling myself away from it,” he said. “But I decided to take a path toward management primarily to become more of an agent of change.”

For example, Gall believes OWRD’s longstanding rules for well-drilling permits have fallen short of protecting groundwater resources.

Rather than take a wide-ranging view of groundwater development, the regulations have been limited to examining its short-term and isolated effects, he said.

“To sustainably manage the resource and protect senior surface water users and groundwater users, we need to have a set of rules that focus more on long-term impacts and also cumulative impacts,” he said.

The agency has proposed revisions that “are taking us in an excellent direction” but will likely “result in less applications getting approved,” Gall said.

Data needed

“We need to have a sufficient amount of data to identify if water is available for the new proposed use or not,” he said. “If we don’t have that data available to us, then someone will need to collect that data to answer that question before we can issue a permit for a new water right.”

The changes are proving contentious among some irrigators and city governments, who worry the rules will be too rigid, while environmental advocates are urging the agency to resist dialing them back.

Despite the controversy, Gall said he expects the new groundwater allocation regulations will ultimately prove politically defensible because they’re “well-grounded in science” to stop further aquifer declines.

Denying applications for new agricultural wells is difficult, but not as much as telling farmers to retire existing fields on which their livelihoods depend, he said.

“That applicant certainly is not happy with ‘no’ for an answer, but they haven’t yet made that investment,” Gall said. “I’d rather catch them early in the process and deny a new application where water is not available, in comparison to going out to a basin where folks have already made that investment and set up lifestyles, and now they’ve got to start reducing that groundwater use.”

Aquifer management

The years Gall spent overseeing groundwater decisions will serve him well as director, as aquifer management is among the thorniest conundrums faced by the agency, he said.

In recent years, the Harney basin in Eastern Oregon has emerged as ground zero for the issue, much as the Klamath basin has become synonymous with surface water controversies.

A “collaborative” group of irrigators and other regional stakeholders have developed “place-based” recommendations for halting steep aquifer declines in portions of the basin.

While the OWRD is incorporating some of those steps in its own plan for the area, tensions have arisen over the degree of influence they’ll have, Gall said.

“One of the major sticking points is that the local community, or at least the groundwater user component of the local community, would like to have more ownership and more of a say in how much groundwater use changes over time,” he said. “I fully support that, but again talking about a sense of urgency to maintain water levels at reasonable levels and get these significant decline levels slowed down. I don’t feel we have a lot of time — you know, decades — before we start the process.”

‘Three-legged stool’

Broadly speaking, the agency is taking a “three-legged stool” approach to over-allocated groundwater in the region, with two voluntary options for growers to reduce water usage and an enforcement backstop if those strategies don’t fully resolve the problem.

“We may get lucky. We may get enough people signed up that it takes care of the problem. It certainly has the potential to,” Gall said.

Under one track, the federal and state governments would pay growers to decrease their water consumption over set periods of time.

Under another, irrigators would voluntarily cut down without receiving compensation, though such agreements will have more flexible parameters for achieving reductions.

Finally, the OWRD will be able to mandate irrigation shutdowns based on water rights seniority under a “critical groundwater area” regulation for the basin.

“We really want to provide the groundwater users a reasonable glide path to reduce their use so it’s not an immediate shut off,” Gall said. “We’re trying to figure out ways to keep as much of the land in production as we can and keep that agricultural economy as viable as possible.”