Ryan Beckley Caught Red-Handed in Incriminating Self-Promotion Video

Ryan Beckley is the president of TerraFirma Foundation Systems. He’s also the president of the Winchester Water Control District (WWCD), owners of the condemned and derelict Winchester Dam on the North Umqpua River, near Roseburg, Oregon.

On August 17, 2023, one week after Beckley perpetrated the biggest fish kill of the year on an Oregon river during attempted repairs at the Winchester Dam, he staged a press conference at the dam repair site.

In attendance were Beckley’s longtime associates, the three Douglas County commissioners, Chris Boice, Tom Kress, and “Timber” Freeman, as well as State Senator David Brock Smith and Representative Virgle Osborne. 

Beckley also invited a videographer to the press conference to produce a five minute and forty-six second video starring and narrated by Beckley. The video documents Beckley’s permit violations-in-progress during the August 2023 repairs of the Winchester Dam as cited by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) in their September 17, 2024, Notice of Non-Compliance.

At the August 17, 2023, press conference, Beckley told Hannah Seibold, a reporter with the Roseburg News Review, that he had personally designed the current dam repair project as a “permanent solution — a fix for 100 years to come.” Beckley declared “There’s never been a salvage effort anywhere comparable to that whatsoever. I’m not trying to paint a picture that we were callous about it or we disregarded it, but we’re spending almost a quarter of a million dollars on fish salvage.”

In the video Beckley says they were, “trying to determine if there’s efficacy in this irrigation effort. So, we’ve got 2,700 feet of irrigation line out there that runs all day.” 

But Beckley’s fish salvage efforts proved merely performative.

Perhaps unwittingly, eight days before the press conference, Beckley slaughtered more than half a million Pacific lamprey, a wild migratory fish native to the North Umpqua River. Juvenile lamprey spend up to seven years filter-feeding in the silt and gravel of stream beds. Beckley’s irrigation line was supposed to keep them from drying out and dying.

But on August 9, 2023, just two days after Beckley drained the private waterski lake behind the Winchester Dam, the dewatered riverbed was exposed to scorching 109º temperatures and Beckley’s sprinkler system proved a complete failure. According to ODFW, more than 550,000 Pacific lamprey–seven generations of wild migratory native fish–were needlessly slaughtered.

In this way, Ryan Beckley became ODFW’s ignominious fish kill champion of 2023 and the WWCD became defendants in the Oregon Department of Justice’s $27.5 million lawsuit.

In the video Beckley claims, “We’ve spent the last three and a half, four years designing a structural upgrade which should have roughly a 100-year lifespan…”

Beckley’s assertions that the 2023 repairs will last a century is hyperbole.

In 1976, an Oregon Water Resources Department inspector condemned the crumbling Winchester Dam, writing “consideration must be given to a permanent dam, the existing wooden dam being considered as temporary in nature … either reconstruction or removal of the dam would be necessary.” That was almost half a century ago. The uninsurable deadbeat dam is rated a “high hazard”– the highest danger rating on the scale – by the Oregon Water Resources Department. This means people are going to die when the dam fails.

In the video Beckley remarks, “We’re repouring the new [concrete] footing still all the way across the entire face of the dam.” But just three weeks after making this statement, Beckley unceremoniously quit the job without completing the new concrete footings or even beginning Phase II of the project. He barely finished 50% of the work contracted before pocketing the remainder of the WWCD homeowner’s money and using it to finance an extensive $200,000 remodel on his two-million-dollar home, while he enjoyed an extended European vacation.

As part of the August 2023 dam repairs, Beckley was supposed to plug the many leaks in the 135-year-old uninsurable Winchester Dam. In the video he states, “We’re installing 109 heavy inch-and-a-half grouted rock anchors. Those drill about 10 feet down into bedrock.”

Although Beckley did install the aforementioned 109 rock anchors, in doing so he cut 109 six-inch holes through the face of the dam. But he never bothered patching them. This is why the Winchester Dam leaks exponentially worse than it did before the August 2023 repairs, as evidenced in a September 12, 2023, video.

In the August 17, 2023 video, Beckley stated, “We inject a two-part epoxy resin; it’s hydrophobic and non-toxic.” Beckley personally signed and submitted his Fish Passage Plan (FPPA) to ODFW for the proposed summer of 2023 Winchester Dam repairs back in October 2022. But according to ODFW’s September 17, 2024, Notice of Non-Compliance the “two-part epoxy resin” mentioned by Beckley in the video was in fact polyurethane foam used to “fill voids along south bank near the powerhouse” in areas “not included in 2022 FPPA” – constituting yet another violation of his permit.

Although Beckley claims the polyurethane foam is “hydrophobic and non-toxic,” the product contains perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), synthetic so-called “forever chemicals” that don’t break down over time. Seventeen states have issued PFAS consumption advisories warning residents that fish from certain lakes or rivers are not suitable for human consumption due to dangerously high levels of PFAS – forever chemicals. In 2020, PFAS were banned worldwide as part of the Stockholm Convention, a global health treaty between 186 countries. Still used in the United States, PFAS are linked to a wide range of health problems, including asthma, decreased fertility, cancer, liver damage, and thyroid disease. Unborn and young children are usually at the highest risk. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), some forever chemicals “take over 1,000 years to decompose.” 

In the video, Beckley says, “There is 70 some years of very clear data that fish migrate through this ladder really, really well. You know, don’t take my word for it; ODF and W publishes the data. Guys like Dave Loomis, who ran this for 27 years, I believe, you know, knows full well that this fish ladder is incredibly effective.”

According to ODFW’s September 17, 2024, Notice of Non-Compliance, the 80-year-old fish ladder at Winchester Dam is the worst in the state. It’s on the wrong side of the river – a full 400-feet away from the main flow, which “can prevent or delay, upstream migrating fish from finding the fish ladder entrance. The fish ladder at the Winchester Dam is so substandard and out-of-date, the exposed rusted rebar is actually dangerous (and sometimes even lethal) to fish attempting to pass through. 

ODFW says the existing fish ladder can result in “fish injury, or harm, including stress.” The “deteriorated internal fishway walls” of the fish ladder “are spalling [fragmenting], which can cause abrasions to fish and result in fish injury, or harm, including stress” and the “presence of exposed rebar, in certain locations, which can cause injuries and abrasions to fish and result in a harm and fish mortality.” 

Ryan Beckley is well aware that the fish ladder at the Winchester Dam is the worst in the state. But he believes that if you repeat a falsehood enough times (as he has for years) people will come to believe it is true.

Nevertheless, in the video, Beckley spouts his pervasive mythology that has been proven false by ODFW and independent fisheries biologists: the myth that the existing Winchester Dam and its disastrous fish ladder somehow prevent invasive species like smallmouth bass from accessing the aquatic habitat upstream of the most dangerous and illegal private waterski lake in Oregon.

Beckley declares in the video, “The current National Marine Fisheries fish ladder standard with a six-inch jump height would mean the invasive species that have decimated fish runs everywhere else would be moving right through here and would decimate the upper North Umqpua.”

Beckley is well aware that his assertion that the Winchester Dam fish ladder prevents invasive species from traveling upstream is patently false. 

It’s so false, that his lawyers has forbidden him saying, posting, or tweeting this fallacy. Instead, Beckley dispatches his errand boys, State Senator David Brock Smith and Representative Virgle Osborne to parrot this falsehood to anyone ignorant enough to listen.

Senator Smith recently filibustered a state senate committee hearing, reading Beckley’s lies into the record while running out the clock so concerned citizens would be deprived of their opportunity to comment. Now that Beckley has “lawyered up,” Smith and his capo Osborne are charged with the misinformation campaign, perjuring themselves to help keep their inept campaign contributor Ryan Beckley and his WWCD co-offfenders from losing their financial sinkhole of a private waterski lake on the very public North Umpqua River.

For the record, on September 12, 2023, Meghan Dugan, the Public Affairs Officer at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, stated that ODFW staff have, in fact, counted smallmouth passing through the Winchester Dam fish ladder. Dugan confirmed that the Winchester Dam does not prevent smallmouth bass from traveling upriver and that Beckley and his lackeys are spreading lies.

In the video, Beckley states, “We’ve got a pretty big section of concrete that will pour on Saturday, and then again pour another one on Monday.”

However, in an abundance of frugality, rather than renting the customary dump truck or cement mixer, ever on-the-cheap, Beckley stored wet concrete in a makeshift, jerry-rigged retention pond on the riverbank build of nothing but super sacks. This inspired decision resulted in dozens of yards of toxic green concrete spilling into the North Umpqua and contaminating the drinking water supply for 37,700 county residents. For this crime, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality fined Beckley $134,000. 

Is it any wonder Beckley has a seat on the Board of Directors of the Community Cancer Center of Roseburg, Oregon?

A picture is worth 1,000 words. The video makes it clear beyond any shadow of a doubt that Beckley triggered OAR 635-412-0005. This statute requires that dam owners work with ODFW “prior to any work occurring, to determine whether that proposed work would be a ‘trigger’ under Oregon’s fish passage … one such ‘trigger’ is defined as major repairs that impact 30% by volume at the time, or 30% of the barrier of the top upstream or downstream faces of the dam.” 

This means that if more than 30% of the dam is repaired, it automatically triggers ODFW’s reevaluation of the dam and its fish passage, frequently requiring that the fish ladder be brought into compliance. And no fish ladder in Oregon is more out of compliance than the one at the Winchester Dam.

Chronically tightfisted, the WWCD Board of Directors is loathe to spend money maintaining their private waterski lake. So Beckley was instructed to be careful not to trigger this new regulation during the summer 2023 Winchester Dam repairs. To this end, they had Beckley submit his October 18, 2022 Fish Passage Plan Application for the planned dam repairs, representing that less than 30% of the overall dam would be modified. 

In the video, Beckley claims the fish ladder in Winchester Dam is “incredibly effective.” In this video, it’s plain to see that Beckley is modifying considerably more than 30% of the dam, which triggered OAR 635-412-0005.

But in the end Beckley was dead wrong.

The fish ladder at the Winchester Dam is, in fact, so ineffective that ODFW’s September 17, 2024, Notice of Non-Compliance ordered the WWCD to build a brand new state-of-the-art $25 million fish ladder to replace it.

Thanks to WWCD president Ryan Beckley, the homeowners in the WWCD are not only on the hook for a $25 million fish ladder and the $27.5 million lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice for the aforementioned massive August 2023 fish kill, they also have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees because their Board of Directors would rather sue state agencies than comply.

It seems unlikely that anyone will allow Ryan Beckley anywhere near the Winchester Dam (or any other dam, for that matter) until the numerous lawsuits and countersuits between the WWCD and state agencies are resolved.