Winchester Water Control Board Lying to Homeowners about $50 Million Blunder

The neighborhood surrounding the Winchester Dam on the North Umpqua River features some of the most expensive residential properties in Douglas County. But the homeowners there can’t understand why their Homeowners Association, the Winchester Water Control District (WWCD), keeps sending them bills for legal services.

What the homeowners don’t know is that the president of the WWCD’s Board of Directors, Ryan Beckley, has racked up more than $50 million in fines and compliance orders for permit violations incurred during the botched 2023 repairs of the condemned and crumbling Winchester Dam. This means that the WWCD has to build a new, state of the art $25 million fish ladder at Winchester Dam – a deadbeat dam that doesn’t provide electricity, flood control, or irrigation and is a potentially lethal safety hazard.

The nine-member WWCD Board of Directors operates like a drug cartel. They have no internet presence. Their street address and phone number are unlisted. They do not publish the minutes or notices of their meetings, as is required by state law. They selectively answer email inquiries, but these responses never bear a name, signature, or street address.

The board instructs the WWCD homeowners that they should never discuss the fines, or lawsuits, or noncompliance with anyone.

WWCD homeowners are flummoxed because they can’t get in touch with their board members. And this is no accident. The WWCD board holds the WWCD homeowners like captive hostages, unaware and in the dark, while the board senselessly racks up millions of dollars in fines which the homeowners are legally obligated to pay. In the process, board members irresponsibly and illegally line their own pockets. It’s a homeowner’s nightmare.

That said, the board members are well aware that if the homeowners actually knew what was going on, they would rise up in revolt.

According to the office of the Oregon Secretary of State, in 2022, the WWCD spend $101,366 in legal fees; in 2023, they spent $91,126. But in 2024 the WWCD spent $271,662 on legals fees – every dollar of which gets billed back to the WWCD homeowners. And in 2025, it will likely be even more due to the increasing number of lawsuits in which the WWCD is either a plaintiff or a defendant.

Similarly, the WWCD only spent $1,413 and $3,610 on insurance in 2022 and 2023, respectively. But after the Oregon Department of Justice filed their $27.5 million lawsuit on October 7, 2023, the WWCD’s insurance costs for 2024 skyrocketed to $110,304, which will also be billed to the homeowners.

Condemned in 1976, the 135-year-old derelict and uninsurable Winchester Dam, five miles north of Roseburg, Oregon, provides no hydroelectricity, irrigation, or flood control. It’s rated a “high hazard,” meaning it will kill people when it fails.

For more than half a century, its only function has been as a private waterski lake for a few wealthy speedboat owners who live in the WWCD.

Ironically, four out of five WWCD homeowners don’t own a speedboat or use the private waterski lake.

Nevertheless, all the homeowners are required share in the expense of maintaining the most dangerous and illegal dam in Oregon. 

Additionally, the WWCD Board of Directors has never disclosed to the homeowner that in April of 2020, seventeen local nonprofit groups sent the WWCD board an offer to permanently remove the Winchester Dam “at little or no direct cost to the District [WWCD].” It’s a standing offer that WWCD board has never acknowledged. Had the WWCD had accepted the offer, the homeowners would not be in such a financial pickle.

But when Ryan Beckley, the president of the WWCD is asked about this generous offer from the seventeen local non-profit groups, he insists “It’s a lie.”

The WWCD homeowners would be shocked and mortified to learn that just one individual is responsible for every single one of these fines and penalties – WWCD board president Ryan Beckley. His criminally negligent mismanagement of the summer 2023 repairs to Winchester Dam has resulted in more the $50 million dollars in fines, legal fees, and compliance costs.

Each of the unsuspecting WWCD homeowners will be paying tens of thousands of dollars each year in legal fees for as long as they live in the WWCD, because their Board of Directors would rather sue to keep their private waterski lake, rather than comply with state laws and regulations by either bringing the dam into compliance or removing it.

In this way, the board members will serve out their term, digging the WWCD homeowners deeper and deeper in debt. A few years later, they’ll sell their house (as one out of 10 property owners in the WWCD do each year), making a tidy profit and moving away, divorcing themselves from the multimillion dollar mess they created. This is so a couple of dozen privileged speedboat-owning neighbors can retain their private waterski lake on a very public river.

Ironically, Ryan Beckley, WWCD president, doesn’t even live in Douglas County.

Beckley’s multimillion-dollar McMansion is in West Linn, Oregon, is 165 miles away from the Winchester Dam.

In a flagrant act of unabashed self-interest, in 2022, Beckley persuaded the WWCD board to award the $3 million dollar Winchester Dam repair contract to Beckley’s own company TerraFirma Foundation Systems, a basement and foundation repair company.

Ryan Beckley knew the job was his even before he submitted an estimate. The board did not solicit competing bids. This is called “collusion in procurement.”

Beckley has no qualifications or previous experience in dam repair. This $3 million contract cost each WWCD homeowner upwards of $30,000 out-of-pocket – a lot of money for a private waterski lake that most of them never even never use.

On August 17, 2023, Beckley told Hannah Seibold, a reporter from the Roseburg News-Review that he personally designed the dam repair project as a “permanent solution — a fix for 100 years to come.” He 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.” (Publisher Patrick Markham has removed from the News-Review website this article and others in which Beckley’s incriminated himself.)

It turns out that Beckley’s assertions were false. Consequently, his lawyer has imposed a gag order on his loquacious client, putting the kibosh of Beckley’s penchant for making false statements to newspaper reporters.

In October 18, 2022 WWCD president and dam repair novice Ryan Beckley, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, personally signed and submitted his Fish Passage Plan to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) for the proposed summer of 2023 Winchester Dam repairs. 

How could the unsuspecting WWCD homeowners have foreseen that this would result in upwards of $50 million in inalienable costs that they would have to pay?

During the August and September 2023 repairs, Beckley singlehandedly violated his fish passage plan so egregiously that he perpetrated the biggest fishkill on an Oregon River in 2023, slaughtering more than half a million Pacific lamprey, a native fish listed as an Oregon State sensitive species in 1993.

This resulted in an unprecedented $27.5 million lawsuit brought by the Oregon Department of Justice against the WWCD and its contractors. Now the WWCD homeowners are now on the hook for ten times more money than any of their houses are worth.

Never intending to complete both phases of the August and September 2023 Winchester Dam repairs, Beckley only finished 50% of the work contracted, failing to even begin Phase II of the project. 

In early September 2023, he quit without notice and pocketed the WWCD homeowner’s money to finance an extensive $200,000 remodel on his two-million-dollar home in West Linn, Oregon, while he enjoyed an extended vacation in Europe.

When the WWCD homeowners learn about this, they’ll wish their Board of Directors had removed the dam in 2020.

The North Umpqua River is the number one steelhead stream in North America, and some say, in the world. But the dam’s fish ladder is considered the worst in the state – an impassible barrier to migratory native fish that blocks access to aquatic habitat upstream, where tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money has been spent on restoration. 

Since Beckley “repaired” the Winchester Dam in 2023, it leaks exponentially worse than it did before. But Beckley made an even bigger blunder.

Although he was well aware that Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) has a regulation whereby, if more than 30% of the dam is repaired, it automatically triggers reevaluation of the dam and its fish passage, frequently requiring that the fish passage and fish ladder to be brought into compliance. 

Inexplicably, Beckley ignore his permit and “repaired” considerably more than 30% of the Winchester Dam, triggering an ODFW reevaluation of the dam’s falling apart and vastly inadequate fish ladder. This resulted in ODFW’s ordering that the fish ladder must be replaced – a cost of upwards of $25 million which the homeowners must pay.

The dam’s 80-year-old substandard concrete fish ladder is worn down to the rusting rebar. It’s 400-feet from the primary summer flow, and it’s on the wrong side of the river, making it nearly impossible for fish to locate.

According to ODFW, 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.” 

On September 17, 2024, Debbie Colbert, the new director of ODFW sent the WWCD Board of Directors a Notice of Noncompliance pertaining to Beckley’s summer 2023 repairs of the dam, informing them that “ODFW has concluded that you, the Winchester Water Control District failed to comply with the requirements of ORS 509.585 (4) and OAR 635-412-0020 (3), prior to conducting work in August and September 2023 on the Winchester Dam, the constituted ‘construction,’ as defined in OAR 635-412-0005 (10) (b) (ii), therefore, ODFW requires that you install fish passage at Winchester dam, consistent with applicable standards, and in the timeline established in this proposed order.”

This means that the WWCD has less than four years to design, build and complete installation of a new, state of the art $25 million fish ladder at Winchester Dam. This is the consequence of allowing Ryan Beckley – an completely unqualified dam repair contractor – to attempt a $3 million repair job that he only half finished. 

$25 million is more than the WWCD has been spent on repair and maintenance of the Winchester Dam in the past six decades.

The Board of Directors has willfully and deliberately prevented the WWCD homeowners from finding out about this monumental multimillion-dollar expense which the homeowners will have to pay.

When the WWCD homeowners learn that they’re on the hook for a $25 million fish ladder, a $27.5 million lawsuit, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, they will be mad as a boiled spotted owl. 

It is worth noting that a couple of WWCD board members have acknowledged the desperation of the situation, admitting that they “feel powerless because “the president of the board” – Ryan Beckley – “is going to do whatever he wants,” irrespective of the board’s decisions.

As is their usual strategy, rather than comply with ODFW’s Notice of Noncompliance, the WWCD Board of Directors is suing ODFW for requiring them to bring their fish-killing fish ladder into compliance. Their attorney, Dominic Carollo, the timber industry’s favorite lawyer, charges the WWCD $500 an hour for his services and the WWCD homeowners pay his bills.

The WWCD Board of Directors doesn’t care how much it costs the homeowners. They know the only way the homeowners can prevent their Board of Directors from bankrupting them, is to sell their house and move out of the WWCD.

One could argue that Ryan Beckley is responsible for this environmental, financial, and legal disaster. But he is merely a symptom of the problem and not the root cause.

The criminal culture of the WWCD Board of Directors is the real problem. They had the power to prevent all of Ryan Beckley’s misdeeds but took no action. 

Unfortunately, the botched summer of 2023 repairs of the Winchester Dam was not an isolated incident. 

Rather, it was part of an ongoing pattern of mismanagement and self-interested perpetrated by the Board of Directors, repeatedly awarding dam repair contracts to whoever happens to be president of the board at the time, regardless of their lack of qualifications.

For example, in 2018, Juan Yraguen, then president of the WWCD Board of Directors and owner of Basco Logging, Inc. (yet another contractor with zero experience in dam repair) was awarded the contract to repair leaks in the Winchester Dam. Predictably, he blew it and was fine by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality for poisoning the drinking water for one out of three county residents­–some 37,700 people.

Prior to October 2023, before ODFW and the Oregon Department of Justice served the WWCD with the $27.5 million fine for the unprecedented fish kill, local realtors advertised properties in the WWCD is having their own “a private waterski lake.”

The “for sale” listing of one of the WWCD properties is currently selling for $1,987,500. But the listing makes no mention of the millions of dollars in expenses that await every WWCD homeowner, thanks to the criminal negligence of board president Beckley and the collusion of their Board of Directors. According to the agent listing the $1,987,500 property, revealing to prospective buyers the WWCDs massive debt and how the homeowners must pick up the tab is “something we tell them later on – it doesn’t have to be disclosed in the listing.”

The homeowners who live in the WWCD are burdened with an eternal, never-ending financial sinkhole, one larger and deeper than that imposed by almost any other Homeowners Association in the nation – the liability of the condemned and crumbling Winchester Dam and its infamous fish-killing fish ladder. 

Once these homeowners understand that their Board of Directors is lying to them, they will quickly realize that the Board of Directors’ fantasy that they can sue their way out of this multimillion-dollar tarpit is wishful thinking.

Whatever transpires, in the end, the WWCD homeowners will be stuck with the tab. And it’s going to be enormous. 

Only one out of five WWCD homeowners live outside Douglas County. More than 30 of the WWCD properties are summer homes for the privileged few.

Sixty-two of the parcels are lakefront properties with green lawns that stretch down to the banks of the private water ski lake that contaminate the North Umpqua River with agricultural runoff 50-feet upstream for the City of Roseburg’s raw water intake. Ironically, these 62 lakefront parcel will increase in square footage when the 17-foot dam is removed and the river returns to its original level.

There is, however, one more crucial detail that the WWCD homeowners don’t know. Because their water control district provides no legitimate “public purpose,” the WWCD itself is, in fact, an illegal organization. 

Oregon Revised Statute 553.020 specifically requires all water control districts to provide a “public purpose” such as hydroelectricity, irrigation, or flood control. ORS 553.020 makes it absolutely clear that “recreation” – the Winchester Dam’s only function or purpose – is not considered a “public purpose.”

WWCD board president Ryan Beckley’s non-compliance is not limited to his management of the Winchester Dam repairs. He operates TerraFirma Foundation Sytems with the same reckless abandon and disregard from the rule of law. 

• In 2021-2022, TerraFirma’s trucking division, headquartered in Roseburg, racked up forty-two trucking violations, including nine unsafe driver violations – all reported by the state of Washington (Oregon doesn’t compile this data). Three were driver fitness violations, seven were maintenance violations, and other violations included speeding, uninsured driver, and open container.  

•  In 2016, the Oregon Construction Contractors Board took disciplinary actions against TerraFirma for working without a permit. 

• In 2018, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined TerraFirma $6,000 for the carbon monoxide poisoning of one Beckley’s employees.

• In 2018, Terrafirma was cited and fined $9,620 by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for a motor vehicle safety violation. 

•In 2019, OSHA fined Terra Firm $420 for safety violations deemed “serious” during a routine inspection of their Tigard, Oregon, office. 

The only solution to this problem is for a few courageous WWCD homeowners to step up to the plate and run for a seat on the WWCD Board of Directors. As it happens, five of the nine positions on the board are currently open.

The Winchester Water Control district is a member of Oregon Special Districts. The WWCD Board of Directors election is scheduled for May 20, 2025. For a $10 fee, candidates who live within the WWCD may file to run in the election after February 8, 2025.

The WWCD homeowners have no alternative but to elect board members with integrity, and to empower and support them to remove the dam. Once elected, board members can vote to accept the standing offer to have the dam removed, freeing themselves and their neighbors from the liability and expense of maintaining the most dangerous and expensive private waterski lake in Oregon.

People rafting and swimming on the private waterski lake have been seriously injured when they were swept by the force of the current over the precipice of the dam, falling seventeen feet onto the bedrock below. And the dam is rated a “a high hazard” by the Oregon Water Resources Department, meaning people will die when the dam fails.

It’s seems that it simply a matter of time before the Winchester Water District members find themselves defendants in a wrongful death lawsuit that will cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.