“Kotek visits Boardman residents with contaminated water for first time, hears frustrations, fears”

May 4, 2023 Oregon Rural Action

By Alex Baumhardt | Oregon Capital Chronicle | May 4, 2023

For the first time, Boardman residents expressed their frustration and worries about their contaminated water to Gov. Tina Kotek in person. During an hourlong meeting in the Boardman Senior Center on Wednesday, dozens discussed their frustration with living with contaminated water for years. They said they had suffered health problems, sometimes losing loved ones to diseases they fear may have been linked to the water. Mike Pearson said he had been drinking his well water for 30 years, unaware until last summer that it contained more than four times the safe limit of nitrates set by federal authorities. “When we bought the place they didn’t say a darn thing about nitrate,” Pearson told Kotek at a community meeting at the Boardman Senior Center. Her visit was the first by an Oregon governor to an area where wells have been contaminated with nitrates for decades, and the first since Morrow County declared a state of emergency over the issue last June. Perhaps thousands of residents in Morrow and Umatilla counties, many of them low-income and Latino, have contaminated well water, but the state has been slow to respond. Kotek has proposed more than $6 million in aid over the next two years for agency staff, water testing, water delivery and filters.