A public meeting will be held Saturday, Dec. 6, at Detroit City Hall to discuss the planned drawdown of Detroit Lake.
The meeting is set for 10 a.m. to noon at 345 N. Santiam Ave. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials will be on hand to answer questions and gather public feedback that will inform a planned supplemental environmental impact study (SEIS) that must be completed before the drawdown can occur in the fall of 2026.
Corps officials are under a court order to improve fish passage in the North Santiam River basin, with the drawdown aimed at making it easier for winter steelhead and spring Chinook to navigate the dam.
For those who can’t participate in Detroit there also are two Salem sessions set for Wednesday, Dec. 10, at noon and 5:30 p.m. at Broadway Commons, Room 307, 1300 Broadway St. in Salem.
In addition comments can be emailed to willamette.eis@usace.army.mil or mailed to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Attn: CENWP-PME-E / Willamette SEIS, P.O. Box 2946, Portland, OR 97208-2946.
The current draft of the SEIS can be viewed at https://www.nwp.usace.army.mil/WVS-EIS/.
The public comment period ends Dec. 29.
“We encourage everyone to participate in the public comment period and help us make informed decisions about the future management of the Willamette Valley dams,” said Col. Dale Caswell, commander of the Portland District.
The Corps is trying to comply with a 2024 National Marine Fisheries Services biological opinion that mandated the Detroit drawdown to ease fish passage issues of endangered spring Chinook and winter steelhead stocks.
Corps officials told a May 31 public forum in Detroit that earlier drawdowns on the South Santiam at Green Peter were much more extensive than the one planned in Detroit and that the Green Peter drawdown exposed more than four times as much sediment as Detroit’s will. The Green Peter drawdowns in 2023 and 2024 produced massive kokanee fish kills and water quality problems. Lebanon and Sweet Home have filed lawsuits over the damages.
The biggest downstream Canyon customer is Stayton, which has grave concerns about keeping its slow sand filtration ponds operating amid high turbidity (sediment in the water).
“We have been working on this consistently,” Stayton city manager Julia Hajduk told Our Town. “We have been meeting with staff and representatives at the state and federal level to convey our concerns and the risk to our water system.”
Stayton’s strategies are:
Avoidance: Eliminating exposure through regulatory, political, and legal means.
Minimization: Reducing the likelihood of interruption by developing alternative source-water options and evaluating pretreatment methods.
Mitigation: Lessening the potential impact through improved operations and demand management.
Elsewhere, Aumsville, Mill City and Sublimity use well water, which is unlikely to be affected. Gates, Jefferson, the Lyons-Mehama Water District, the Santiam Water Control District and Turner also face the possibility of poor water quality in the North Santiam River overwhelming their water treatment systems.
Detroit and Idanha won’t be affected, although officials are concerned about possible economic impacts.
