The Portland Water Bureau is the municipal water department for the city of Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon. Its service district includes 225 miles within the Portland metropolitan area. The bureau manages a water supply that comes mainly from the Bull Run River in the foothills of the Cascade Range east of the city and secondarily from the Columbia South Shore Well Field near the Columbia River.
A city charter reform, passed by Portland voters in 2022, moved leadership of city bureaus out of the portfolios of city commissioners. The last commissioner to oversee this bureau was Mingus Mapps in 2024. As of 2025, the bureau is under the umbrella of the Public Works Service Area, headed by Deputy City Administrator for Public Works Priya Dhanapal. The interim director is Edward Campbell.
As of 2025, the city is moving to merge the Portland Water Bureau with Portland Environmental Services in an initiative called "One Water".
The Willamette River Crossing Project, which would replace piping that brings water to the West side of the city, is set to begin in 2027–2028. Prior to the replacement, this piping remains vulnerable to breakages in the case of an earthquake.
Budgeted departmental revenues for fiscal year 2015–16 included about $157 million for charges for services.
History
Sources private and public In 1843 or 1844, William Overton and Asa Lovejoy, while traveling by canoe from Fort Vancouver to Oregon City, stopped to rest on the west bank of the Willamette River and agreed it would be a good place for a town. Laying claim to of riverfront land, they founded what in 1851 became the incorporated city of Portland. Relying entirely on water from wells until the mid-1850s, Portland residents became concerned when polluted drainage from the city's growing number of houses began to contaminate the wells. In 1856, Pioneer Water Works, a private company, got permission from Portland's government to pipe water from Caruthers Creek to some of these homes. Twice changing hands and becoming the Portland Water Company, the business added new pipes and pumps to obtain water from Balch Creek and the Willamette River, but failed to meet ever-increasing demand for clean water. Based on water-quality surveys and engineering studies, the Portland Fire and Water Committee recommended in 1872 that the City build its own water system. To issue bonds to finance the project, it needed state approval.
The Oregon Legislature denied approval until 1884–85, when waste from upstream factories and towns—as well as Portland's own waste, returned to Portland by tidal fluctuations on the Willamette—caused another pollution crisis. In the face of public protests about dirty water, the legislature relented, and the Portland Water Committee began work on a municipal system in 1885. The Water Committee was also created because of the political rivalry between Joseph Simon and John H. Mitchell. Simon was attempting to isolate the power of the Mitchell faction.
The 15-member committee was made up of the most prominent businessmen in Portland, and was led by Henry Failing. It was derisively named the "Oligarchy of 15" by a 6-1 vote of the Portland City Council. While Failing was the official leader through 1897, "William S. Ladd was the dominant spirit", and meetings were always held at his Ladd & Tilton Bank. Ladd also supplied an initial $20,000 needed for the system.
The committee bought the infrastructure of the Portland Water Company in 1886 and began a search for a superior water source, which led them to the Bull Run Watershed in 1887. A committee meeting in early 1887 selected Bull Run with only Simeon Reed opposing the development, who favored continuing to use the Willamette.
Isaac W. Smith an engineer and surveyor, was commissioned to inspect any viable water supply in the region. After considering options including Oswego Lake and the Clackamas River, Smith settled on the Bull Run River as the most likely prospect. A five-month survey trip led Smith to conclude that a gravity-flow system could deliver clean water from the river to Portland. The committee and Judge Matthew Deady drafted a bill to finance the $500,000 cost. It was vetoed by Governor Sylvester Pennoyer in early 1889, which led Deady to state "in view of his impracticable, cranky nature and conduct he ought to be called Sylpester Annoyer."
Most landowners along the Bull Run stream agreed to sell their rights for nominal fees. One exception was a civil engineer who, based on his own investigations, had bought land and water rights along the river in hopes of re-selling them to the city. After much negotiating, he relinquished his rights in 1888. In 1891, the Oregon Legislature authorized the city to sell bonds to pay for the Bull Run project, which began delivering water to Portland in 1895.
When the Bull Run water first arrived in Portland in January 1895, Pennoyer was asked to give a toast. "After tasting his glass of Bull Run water he commented that it had neither body nor flavor; he much preferred the old Willamette".
Protecting the supply
To protect the water supply from contamination, the committee sought federal help in reducing logging and tree-clearing in the watershed. In 1892, President Benjamin Harrison, using powers granted to him by the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, established the Bull Run Forest Reserve, later included in the Bull Run National Forest. This law prohibited settlement in the reserve and made it easier for the committee to acquire private land and water rights in the basin.
Despite the new restrictions, fishing, hunting, camping, and cattle and sheep grazing were still allowed. The committee sought further restrictions, and in 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the Bull Run Trespass Act to further protect the reserve and the water. Over the next half-century, the Portland Water Board, the committee's successor, added diversion structures, storage reservoirs, treatment equipment, and water conduits to the original system. However, by the mid-1950s, the City of Portland and the United States Forest Service began to strongly disagree about logging in and public access to the watershed. In 1959, the Forest Service opened to recreation, and in 1960 Congress passed the Multiple-Use – Sustained Yield Act that, among other things, stressed timber production in the national forests. Between the late 1950s and 1976, the Forest Service allowed about to be logged in the reserve.
Ruling on a citizen lawsuit, Miller v. Mallery, Judge James M. Burns agreed in 1976 that logging in the reserve violated the Trespass Act of 1904. He ordered that further recreation, logging, and hydropower development cease in the reserve. Because it wanted to develop hydropower along the Bull Run River, the City of Portland sought revised legislation. U.S. Representative Robert B. Duncan and U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield introduced such legislation, which led in 1977 to passage of the Bull Run Watershed Management Act. It established the Bull Run Watershed Management Unit (BRWMU) and removed Portland's control over the fraction of the reserve that had been opened to recreation in 1959. Although the new law allowed hydropower production within the BRWMU, the unit's main purpose was to produce pure drinking water for the City of Portland and other entities in the Portland metropolitan area. Shortly thereafter, the City built the Portland Hydroelectric Project, which included two powerhouses and a transmission line. Logging did not immediately cease in the unit because the new law allowed activities unless they could be shown to reduce water quality. While the City and the Forest Service worked on water-quality standards, logging continued on a smaller scale, including a 1983 operation to salvage about of trees downed by a windstorm. Between 1958 and 1993, when all timber-cutting operations ceased in the BRWMU, about , roughly 22 percent of the water-supply drainage, had been logged.
Subsequent legislation affecting the watershed included federal designation in 1994 of about 75 percent of the BRWMU as a reserve for protecting the Northern Spotted Owl and other species dependent on old-growth forests. This designation further restricted logging. In 1996, the Oregon Resources Conservation Act generally prohibited logging on all Forest Service lands within the Bull Run water-supply drainage and another of land that drained to the lower Bull Run River. In 2001, President George W. Bush signed the Little Sandy Act, which extended the prohibitions to the entire BRWMU and expanded it to include public lands along the Little Sandy River, a tributary of the Bull Run River. In addition, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, the Northwest Forest Plan, and the Endangered Species Act all regulate the unit.
Although the BRWMU is generally closed to the public, the Portland Water Bureau offers tours of the watershed, usually in the summer or fall. In addition, the Pacific Crest Trail, heavily used for hiking, crosses the watershed along the eastern boundary of the management unit.
Corruption and graft The Portland Water Bureau was always rumored to be managed by corrupt city commissioners. By 1913 it had what E. Kimbark MacColl referred to, tongue in cheek, as a "giant leak". The bureau sold its water unmetered and gave much away, such as to Henry Pittock, who not only received free water but also a pipe to his hillside Pittock Mansion.
Portland City Council commissioner Will Daly instituted much reform from 1911 to 1917, including the unmetered water and free supply. However, as Mayor Baker reigned (1917–1933), Commissioner John Mann returned to the previously corrupt practices. One clerk stole an estimated $20,000 during the 1920s. Mann and Baker's mortgages were paid off by unnamed benefactors; Mann drove a luxury car paid for by the Water Bureau, and had a private resort in the Bull Run watershed, built by bureau employees. Mann "ran the bureau like a dictator". Henry Gross and a local Reverend Johannsen began the effort to recall Mann and Baker, primarily over the highly indebted Water Bureau. A grand jury indicted Mann, though charges were dropped in 1931 by a new district attorney, Lotus Langley. By then, Mann, Mayor Baker, and Earl Riley were embroiled in accepting bribes for locating the Portland Public Market. Johannsen and Gross began a recall effort against Mann, Baker, Riley, and Langley.
After Governor Julius Meier sent forensic accountant Frank Akin to find corruption at the Port of Portland, Akin turned to the Water Bureau. Akin was murdered the day before he was slated to present Port evidence to the Oregon state legislature, when he was only a month into his Water Bureau investigation. Many rumors swirled around Akin's death, and his report on the water bureau disappeared. Commissioner Jake Bennett was documented to have the only other copy of it; a year later, he claimed to have returned it to the auditor's office, which The Oregonian dutifully reported.
Infrastructure
Bull Run Lake to headworks
One large natural lake, two artificial reservoirs, and the Bull Run River and its tributaries lie within the watershed. Seasonal precipitation produces streamflows that vary from up to (49,000,000 m3) per day to as low as (110,000 m3) per day.
Bull Run Lake, the highest lake in the watershed, is natural. When it is full, its surface is at above sea level. Water from the lake seeps through the ground into the river at a rate of a day and flows into artificial reservoirs at two points further downstream.
The Portland Water Bureau built Dam 1, a concrete arch-gravity dam, in 1929 to create Reservoir 1, also known as Ben Morrow Lake. The larger of the two reservoirs, it holds a maximum of . In 1962, the bureau finished Dam 2, an earthfill dam with a maximum storage capacity of . Although the two reservoirs combined can hold up to about , the total usable storage is about .