December 13, 2019
Oregon Water Coalition Members,
The Oregon Water Coalition (OWC) was founded over 25 years ago with the mission of promoting “the responsible development, conservation, and utilization of water in northeastern Oregon”. This mission drove OWC to be an active force in facilitating the spread of information, most notably through annual meetings that bring local water users together to learn from experts in the field.
For the past few years, there have been many conversations about the specific purpose of OWC and how it can remain relevant 25 years after its founding. Today, with a renewed mission and higher level of activity, OWC remains dependent upon grants and other donations. OWC recognizes that many of its members and supporters contribute to other organizations. OWC does not want to compete with other worthy organizations, however, OWC seeks to preserve the legacy of its educational and outreach in water and agriculture.
In order to sustain funding, OWC once again is asking for your continued support and that you will consider renewing your membership. As well as, if you have the ability, that you would consider donating a little extra for our scholarship fund.
Those funds will continue to be used for operations and also as seed money to fund a scholarship for young professionals like Marika who enter graduate programs that will train them to represent water interests of our region. The goal of the scholarship fund is to incentivize the next generation of lawyers, policy makers, and researchers to live and work in Eastern Oregon.
We would like to start looking for the next recipient of our scholarship. If anyone knows of a young person who is considering a degree in fields such as Law and/or Engineering relating to Water Environment and Natural Resources, please let us know. We would love to hear about this student.
OWC has taken several steps to ensure the spirit of the organization can thrive. We remain committed to providing educational opportunities about water issues. We want to say thank you and we appreciate your renewed membership and your continued support. We couldn’t do what we do without the support from our members.
Below you will find a letter from Marika. She was our former coordinator, and our first scholarship recipient. She is updating us about her first year of law school and a fellowship that she was chosen for last summer.
Sincerely,
Ray Kopacz, President
Update from Marika Sitz, former OWC coordinator and current law student.
December 13, 2019
To the Oregon Water Coalition Board:
I am writing to provide you with an update about my first year of law school and the subsequent summer. The scholarship and support from OWC have helped to make many of the following accomplishments possible.
I wrapped up my first year of law school in May. Although I felt a bit frustrated during my first semester (it was harder than I thought to get back into the academic world), I hit my stride during the second. Currently, I am in the top half of the class, and I think I will be able to continue to rise in the ranks as I start taking more classes that are up my alley, like water law. A highlight of the first year of law school is the “oral argument”, where each student writes a fifteen-page brief and then argues for 10 minutes in front of a panel of three judges. I received the highest grade on my oral argument and was among the top scorers for my written brief.
While academics are certainly important, I’d also like to highlight some non-academic accomplishments. This February, the University of Oregon law school hosted its annual Public Interest Environmental Law Forum (PIELC). PIELC brings together hundreds of individuals from the environmental community. This year’s theme was “common ground”, and I took it seriously. I helped arrange three panels for the conference: Place-Based Natural Resource Planning in Oregon, Agricultural Runoff in Oregon, and West Coast Comparative Groundwater Management. As part of these panels, we had participants from the Oregon Farm Bureau, Oregon State University, and the eastern Oregon region in general. I don’t believe many of these individuals would normally be included at PIELC, and I was happy I could help assemble panels that featured more varied perspectives on water and agriculture.
My work as an Oceans, Coasts and Watersheds fellow at the Environmental and Natural Resources Center at UO Law this year included a range of small research projects. In the second semester, I helped with some work on ORS 537.745, which focuses on voluntary agreements among water users in a basin. I was selected to continue this fellowship through my second year. Currently, the research team is working on a larger project in collaboration with Oregon State to model the Willamette Basin Watershed. As part of that work, I have had the chance to do research on secondary water rights in Oregon and attend stakeholder meetings.
During the middle of last spring semester, I was chosen as a Wayne Morse Fellow through the Wayne Morse Center at UO Law. The fellowship places students at various congressional offices in DC. My summer placement was in Representative Greg Walden’s DC office. Over the ten-week fellowship, I worked on a variety of projects for the office. However, my main project was a written report on the status of the tribal water rights settlement in the Umatilla Basin. This project allowed me to leverage the background knowledge I had gained while I was working with OWC and produce a comprehensive report for Walden’s office.
Again, I am incredibly grateful for the support of OWC—to its board and its members—who have helped support my law school education and opened the door to these great opportunities.
Sincerely,
Marika