End of the Year Accomplishments Arriving Shortly
While you may still be digesting the latest edition of WaterWatch's Instream newsletter, our annual end-of-the-year accomplishments appeal will arrive in your mailbox early next week. Sporting a new, more dynamic and lean design with capsule descriptions of some of WaterWatch's most notable legal and policy accomplishments of 2023, you'll also find a QR code on the back that will take you to a page at the WaterWatch website with more detailed descriptions of our programs and accomplishments.

A Bonus Victory to Celebrate on the Crooked River
In addition to our victory obtaining legal protection for instream flows in the Crooked River, our years of work to block new storage projects above Prineville Reservoir resulted in those applications being pulled, including one that would have inundated a portion of the Wild and Scenic North Fork Crooked. With those proposed storage projects no longer a threat, water that was at issue under these storage proposals can flow into Prineville Reservoir to meet the downstream fish flows protected by the Crooked River Act and the new state water right!

Drift Creek Victory in the Salem Statesman Journal
In the previous edition of Currents we shared stories from KOIN 6 in Portland and KLCC in Eugene on our win in the Drift Creek dam proposal case. The Salem Statesman Journal also filed a story on the Oregon Court of Appeals' decision to uphold the 2019 denial to build the dam, in part because the creek's instream water right prevented such a development due to the harm it would cause native cutthroat trout, noting "environmental groups including WaterWatch of Oregon" had been fighting the proposal for a decade.

Another Successful Giving Tuesday
WaterWatch kicked off our end-of-the-year fundraising campaign with Giving Tuesday earlier this week. Thank you to everyone who shared their support for WaterWatch with family and friends and included WaterWatch as part of their gifts as we continue to diversify our donor base and increase our volume of small-dollar donations. Giving to WaterWatch remains an effective investment in countering the moneyed and political interests that would otherwise dam and drain our rivers.