Eastern Oregon rancher who called for action on water pollution to run for state House

by Alex Baumhardt, Oregon Capital Chronicle
December 2, 2025

A rancher and former county commissioner who raised alarm bells about polluted groundwater in eastern Oregon hopes to replace an incumbent Republican who has represented the area for 25 years.

Jim Doherty, a rancher and former Morrow County Commissioner, announced Tuesday he’ll seek the Republican nomination for the 57th House District, a vast and sparsely populated area of north central Oregon.

Doherty, 60, is so far running unopposed. Incumbent state Rep. Greg Smith, a Republican from Heppner and the seniormost member of the Oregon House, has not said whether he’ll run for a 14th term. Smith did not respond to a call or text from the Capital Chronicle on Tuesday.

Smith is currently the subject of three Oregon Ethics Commission investigations for manipulating his pay at a public agency and violating business disclosure laws. He is also being sued by Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield for helping business associates buy an illegally undervalued internet company through a nonprofit development corporation, raking in millions.

The 57th district includes most of northeast Oregon: Morrow, Gilliam, Sherman, and Wheeler counties and parts of Umatilla, Wasco, Jefferson, Marion and Clackamas counties. There are twice as many Republicans registered to vote in the district as Democrats, but non-affiliated voters make up more than half of all registered voters in the area, according to the state’s latest voter registration data.

Doherty is best-known in recent years for raising alarm bells about groundwater nitrate contamination that has led to well-users in Morrow and Umatilla counties — many of whom are low-income and Latino — consuming unsafe drinking water.

In 2022, he and a local Morrow County Health Department official led a door-to-door water testing campaign that showed many residents in the city of Boardman had high levels of nitrate in water coming from their wells. As a county commissioner at the time, Doherty backed a county-wide emergency declaration to usher in state support for water testing and to provide clean drinking water to residents.

But that same year, after six years on the commission, voters recalled Doherty and another commissioner who also backed the emergency declaration. According to the recall petitioners, the two commissioners were not transparent in terminating a county administrator. Both Doherty and Melissa Lindsay, the other commissioner, said powerful interests from food processing and agricultural industries responsible for groundwater contamination backed the recall campaign.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has determined the main sources of nitrate contamination in the area are from fertilizers and manures originating at area farms and livestock and dairy operations, as well as food processors — including major food processors operating at the Port of Morrow, the second largest port in the state and an economic powerhouse of the region.

Following Doherty’s campaign and widespread reporting on the pollution issues, Gov. Tina Kotek and state agencies eventually released a comprehensive plan for curbing years of water pollution in the region that will take decades to achieve.

Water contamination worsened as DEQ went easy on Port of Morrow

Doherty is running in part because he wants more robust action to be taken to address the pollution issues in northeast Oregon.

“It’s just being pushed off further and further into the future, but it’s affecting folks every day. So I think it’s super important,” he said.

Besides addressing the area’s groundwater pollution, Doherty said his priorities in office would include increasing access to affordable child care and handling new water and energy challenges presented by the growing number of data centers being built in Morrow and Umatilla counties.

“I think we need to take a long term look at our future — what does it look like 15 years from now? Or seven generations, as the tribes would say? We can’t just live for the moment,” he said. “There’s a huge boon with the dollars that come in, but we need to look at quality of life. So I think these things need to be addressed.”

Doherty in 2024 ran unsuccessfully against state Sen. Todd Nash, R-Enterprise, also a rancher and former head of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association. Doherty said following that run, many of the people he’d talked with during the campaign asked him not to wait four years to try again, “but to just try and get down to Salem,” he said.

Doherty is a graduate of Blue Mountain Community College and Eastern Oregon University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business and history. In addition to his years on the Morrow County Commission, Doherty has served as president of the Association of Oregon Counties, as a member of the governor’s Alcohol & Drug Policy Commission and on several county soil and water conservation districts in eastern Oregon.

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