Many of the tide gates that protect Oregon’s coastal farmlands from being inundated with saltwater have become relics of a bygone era.

As these old tide gates deteriorate, the farmers who rely on them worry that their time may be running out as well.

“As soon as a tide gate goes out, you can’t graze, you can’t raise hay. You’ve lost your land, basically. It’s not productive anymore,” said Craig Herman, who raises cattle and hay between Coquille and Bandon in southwestern Oregon.

The aging tide gates block fish from swimming between the ocean and river estuaries, disrupting a crucial part of their life cycle.

Though some tide gates still function despite being as much as a century old, they’re considered outdated under modern regulatory standards.

New tide gates needed

“They’re at the end of their lives, a lot of them, so the need to replace them is something we can anticipate will be happening,” said Irma Lagomarsino, senior policy adviser with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Innovative new tide gates don’t obstruct fish but they’re much more expensive, potentially costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, depending on their size and complexity.

“That’s a lot of money for a small producer,” Herman said.

In its most primitive form, a tide gate is basically a door attached to the end of a culvert or channel: The build-up of river water behind it forces the gate to swing open, draining estuaries and farmland of flood waters. Otherwise, the door remains closed against the rising ocean tides, protecting upriver property from an incursion of saltwater that damages crops.

“It kills the grass and it screws up the dirt,” said Zac Mallon, coordinator of the Lower Nehalem Watershed Council. “You change up the soil chemistry. It modifies the pH,” a measure of acidity.

Fish requirements

The trouble with this simple but effective mechanism is it doesn’t comply with fish passage regulations that Oregon lawmakers imposed two decades ago.

Farmers who want to replace or significantly repair old tide gates must comply with these standards, which means the structures must remain open to fish more than half the time. Water traveling through the opening also cannot be flowing so fast that fish are unable to swim upstream.

While engineers can meet those standards, some growers suspect that “environmentally minded” officials in the state and federal governments would rather see non-compliant tide gates be removed than be replaced with more advanced devices.

“You get a sense from some of these agencies that they’d do anything not to allow a tide gate replacement, because they want fully reconnected waterways,” said Chad Allen, a dairy farmer in Tillamook.

Without a tide gate serving as a barrier, the natural rhythms of outgoing river water and incoming tide water would return to the estuary, restoring its ecological function — at the cost of productive farmland.

“We’re not going to be developing more high-value farmland,” Allen said.

Planning ahead

Even farmers who obtain funding for sophisticated tide gate structures still face permitting hurdles that can delay replacement projects for years. For that reason, they must begin planning long before tide gates break down.

“If we hadn’t gotten it done, eventually they would have forced me out,” said Steve Neahring, a dairy farmer near Nehalem. “If you get a failure, you can’t wait two or three years to get a permit to fix it.”

Without a tide gate, roughly one-fourth of Neahring’s farm would be vulnerable to inundation with tide waters.

However, the structure that had long protected his property had stopped functioning effectively — the culvert had partially collapsed, impeding the water flowing out of the estuary. While the tide gate still blocked saltwater, it contributed to flooding upstream.

“I was taking on more water than I could get rid of,” Neahring said. That decreased the quality of his forage and prevented him from letting cows out to pasture as often. “It was just a maintenance nightmare.”

“Your field is sitting under water and you’re getting fewer rotations on it,” said Mallon of the Lower Nehalem Watershed Council, which helped the dairy replace the aging tide gate.

Luckily for Neahring, the Nehalem River’s estuary is considered valuable fish habitat, which meant that grants were available to replace the tide gate in 2017. About 70% of the $460,000 project was covered by state and nonprofit dollars.

The new structure is a “muted tidal regulator” that stays open for fish by default, until a flotation device indicates that tidewaters have risen to the point that the gate must close. Once the tide level drops again, the door re-opens and stays that way.

While the device doesn’t allow tide waters to rise to historic levels, they still inundate part of the estuary while flushing sediment from ditches to the benefit of farmland, said Leo Kuntz, a tide gate specialist with Nehalem Marine Manufacturing who designed the mechanism.

“That’s what a muted tide is: It’s a small tide,” Kuntz said. “We’re trying to raise fish and cows together, and we’ve been real successful at it.”

Cost a factor

The problem is that some tide gates only affect a relatively small number of acres, said Herman, the cattle and hay farmer. They’re not cost effective for the landowner to replace without financial help, but they’re also not a priority for habitat restoration.

“You’re not big enough to get any grants. The little guy is caught between a rock and a hard place,” he said.

Farmers who are able to obtain funding don’t escape adverse impacts, since grants and permits are contingent on making operational changes to benefit habitat, said Sharon Waterman, a Coos County grower.

Fencing streams, planting trees and re-digging channels so they meander are common requirements that reduce the farmable acres and complicate management, she said.

“You can’t do anything without mitigation,” Waterman said. “Unless you do the mitigation they want, you’re not going to get a permit.”

New partnership

Five years ago, lobbyists from agricultural and conservation organizations convinced state lawmakers to create the Oregon Tide Gate Partnership, which is intended to bring state and federal agencies together to solve the modernization problem.

Lawmakers also allocated $3 million to plan and construct new tide gates.

“They really sit at the intersection of working lands and natural resources,” said Jillian McCarthy, the state’s tide gate coordinator. “On the one side is the ag community side and on the other side is the fish side.”

At this point, the partnership has developed an inventory of where the state’s 1,000 tide gates are, with help from Oregon State University and other partners. The Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board is also funding two computer-based projects to help with replacement planning.

One software tool estimates the correct size of pipes needed for tide gate replacements that meet regulatory standards, which reduces some of the preliminary engineering costs.

The other is a “decision support tool” to help prioritize funding for tide gate replacements, based on the value of estuary habitat and the property protected.

“How do we pick which tide gates to replace? The answer really depends on who is asking the question,” said Jena Carter, Oregon coast and marine director for The Nature Conservancy, which developed the tool.

The decision support software allows the question to be examined through “multiple lenses” to examine whether an investment is worthwhile, she said.

“Whether a project occurs on the ground requires a lot of factors to come together,” Carter said. “It will be imperfect because every property is unique, but it will give us a hypothetical ballpark estimate.”

Helping fish

The Coquille Watershed Association, which developed the pipe-sizing tool, is also studying fish passage to verify that new tide gates actually help these species and their habitat.

“Our monitoring results have been very exciting. There really has been this response from fish,” said Melaney Dunne, the association’s executive director. “We’re really encouraged by our initial results.”

Young fish that can access estuary habitat are better able to survive ocean conditions, since food is more available in these areas and currents aren’t as strong, she said. “They are able to get fatter, get bigger, and not expend the energy they would in the main part of the river.”

River estuaries also help fish transition from fresh water to salt water conditions, said Mallon of the Lower Nehalem Watershed Council.

“They need that to figure out how to breath salt water,” he said. “They go through the process where they need to duck back and forth to train their gills.”

Apart from allowing fish to travel upstream, properly functioning tide gates also prevent fish from getting trapped in wetland areas with little water when tides recede.

“If it’s a hot day, the water gets way too hot and it would become lethal,” said Tom Josephson, habitat restoration program manager with the Columbia River Estuary Task Force, which helped conduct the tide gate inventory.

“Impounded water heats up a lot faster than water that keeps moving,” due to its exposure to solar radiation, said Narayan Elasmar, the nonprofit’s habitat restoration biologist.

Regulatory problems

The barriers to tide gate replacement aren’t only technological but also regulatory. Projects typically require approval from nine levels of federal, state and county government, according to experts.

Simplifying the regulatory process for landowners is an important goal of the Oregon Tide Gate Partnership, but whether it can be achieved invites skepticism.

“The regulatory streamlining piece is the biggest question mark in my mind,” said Mary Anne Cooper, vice president of public policy for the Oregon Farm Bureau.

The regulatory checklist for permits is lengthy and farmers must also contend with contradictory instructions regarding state and federal fish passage requirements, she said.

“The agencies are asking two things that actually conflict with each other, and they don’t know which to follow,” Cooper said. “It’s not a real solution for most people.”

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife is now working with the federal National Marine Fisheries Service to resolve inconsistencies at the outset of tide gate replacement projects, said Greg Apke, ODFW’s fish passage coordinator.

“We have recognized some challenges with our tide gate rules. We’re trying to provide clarity with our rules,” Apke said. “What we heard from most people is this process is tough: ‘We don’t understand it and we don’t have money for it.’”

Even as they try to “boil down” the regulatory process, state and federal regulators are limited in the changes they can make, he said. They must still comply with state and federal laws that deal with fish passage.

“What we can’t do is rewrite the different authorities,” Apke said.

State regulations pertain to the passage requirements of native fish, while the federal rules are geared toward those protected under the Endangered Species Act, he said. Those species may have different life cycles and needs.

“There are contradictions sometimes, and conflicts,” Apke said. “We try to manage those authorities as best we can without causing conflicts among those authorities.”

Secret motives?

When asked about the perception that some government workers actively impede replacement projects, Apke said he didn’t want to speculate about the secret objectives of individual people.

“I’m not sure how to best answer that, and maybe I don’t answer that,” he said.

Lagomarsino, the senior policy adviser with NMFS, said federal regulations are less specific and more flexible than those imposed by the state, but she acknowledged there have been “unaligned processes that lead to conflicts.”

Such problems will recede now that the agencies are working together from the beginning to understand landowner goals and how to achieve them, she said. “That early involvement is super important.”

The agency is committed to upholding the requirements of the ESA without stopping landowners from making a living, Lagomarsino said. “We understand things are not going to go back to those pristine conditions before tide gates. We believe we can recover salmon and still have tide gates.”