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It’s not every day that the CEO of one of Oregon’s most prominent companies gets a hasty summons to federal court.
But on Friday, a little before 11 am, Maria Pope, the CEO of Portland General Electric, the state’s largest utility, arrived at the U.S. District Court in Portland.
Pope came to offer testimony that was unplanned when a trial began April 21 pitting her company against the state of Oregon and the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.
Pope did not appear on the pretrial list of scheduled or potential witnesses. But two Grand Ronde witnesses—the tribe’s in-house counsel Rob Greene and tribal chairwoman Cheryle A. Kennedy—presented testimony April 24 about a meeting they’d had with Pope in the summer of 2018 that spurred PGE’s attorneys to call the utility’s top executive as a rebuttal witness. They announced the addition late Thursday afternoon.
Nothing about this trial is routine. On one level, the dispute is about the Grand Ronde’s desire to harvest a modest number of salmon for ceremonial purposes—no more than 15 a year—at Willamette Falls, which, in addition to being sacred to the tribe, is the second-largest waterfall by volume in the U.S. (trailing only Niagara Falls). It’s also the site of the oldest commercial hydroelectric dam in the Columbia River basin, PGE’s T.W. Sullivan dam, built in 1888.
On another level, the trial is about the tense relations between the Grand Ronde and four other tribes that also claim historical ties to Willamette Falls: the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation, Umatilla Indian Reservation, and Siletz Indians.
Those tribes issued a statement of support for PGE on April 17, on the eve of trial.
“Amidst the often-fraught landscape of attempting to balance resource development and indigenous rights, PGE has chosen a path of collaboration and respect to the rights of all tribes to continue their traditional uses of the Falls, and that effort deserves our recognition and support,” the statement said. “PGE’s offer of a Permanent Cultural Practice Easement at Willamette Falls, developed in partnership with these four tribes, is more than a legal formality; it is a tangible expression of respect and understanding.”
In the trial, PGE proposed to condemn a 5-acre rocky outcropping just below the dam owned by the Oregon Department of State Lands. That in itself is also unusual. Governments sometimes use the power of condemnation to take private property (with compensation) for public purposes. It’s far less common for private companies to take public land. In 2021, however, the U.S. Supreme Court found, in certain instances, that companies may do so.
PGE decided to move forward with condemnation in 2022. The utility acted after the state granted the Grand Ronde a license in 2018 to build a fishing platform on the site. PGE, which had earlier declined to allow the Grand Ronde a spot for ceremonial fishing, first offered the state $150,000 for the property. The state said no.
In the first two days of trial, PGE witnesses made a case that the state needed to condemn the land for safety purposes and to be in compliance with its license with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates dams. Utility officials described the sometimes treacherous conditions—slippery rocks, variable water conditions, debris spilling over the falls—that they said formed the basis of their concerns.
Nick Loos, a PGE engineer responsible for the Willamette Falls dam, said tribal politics had nothing to do with his concerns about the Grand Ronde fishing platform. “My only interest was safety,” Loos testified.
By contrast, the Grand Ronde argued PGE was acting in bad faith, motivated not by safety concerns but by the desires of a business partner, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs, to block the Grand Ronde from establishing a physical presence—the fishing platform—on a site that the Warm Springs and other tribes also hold sacred.
(PGE operates the Pelton Round Butte hydroelectric complex on the Deschutes River. Part of the project is on the Warm Springs Reservation, and the Warm Springs tribe is now the majority owner of the project. As the Oregon Journalism Project first reported, the tribe’s ownership stake yielded a payment of $47.3 million in 2023.)
In a January ruling rejecting both parties’ motions for summary judgment, Judge Michael Simon wrote that he’d weigh at trial whether PGE indeed acted out of legitimate safety concerns, or as Grand Ronde argued, was seeking condemnation in bad faith.
On April 24, Greene, the Grand Ronde attorney, described a meeting at PGE in the summer of 2018. He said that Pope, the utility’s top executive, minced no words in describing PGE’s opposition to the Grand Ronde fishing platform.
“Ms. Pope said Warm Springs objects,” Greene testified. “She said, ‘We have a strong relationship with the Warm Springs,’ and because of that relationship, PGE needed to honor those objections and couldn’t move forward with the platform.”
Grand Ronde tribal chairwoman Cheryle Kennedy offered a similar account of the meeting in her testimony.
“[Pope] said the concerns are coming from the Warm Springs and the Umatilla tribes and that they had a business relationship at Pelton Round Butte dam and she didn’t want anything to interfere with that relationship,” Kennedy testified.
That testimony about the 2018 meeting with Pope appeared to prompt a change in PGE’s strategy. The utility’s attorneys at Perkins Coie told the court when testimony concluded Thursday that Pope would testify Friday morning.
Pope’s recollection of the 2018 meeting—a meeting the Grand Ronde’s Greene had memorialized in a subsequent letter to PGE—was less detailed than Greene and Kennedy’s.
Pope said she didn’t recall much of the Grand Ronde witnesses’ testimony and recalled the conversation being about the tribe’s desire to harvest lamprey at Willamette Falls, rather than erecting a fishing platform for catching salmon.
She denied telling the Grand Ronde that PGE’s business relationship with the Warm Springs was dictating the utility’s position on Willamette Falls. Instead, Pope recalled saying the utility wanted to be a neutral party and not involve itself in tribal disputes.
“Our interest was to ensure that there could be access for all tribes,” Pope testified. “It was very important to me that PGE not get between tribal interests. We asked that they work it out themselves.”
Pope’s brief testimony—it lasted less than 30 minutes—concluded the examination of witnesses. Judge Simon, who will decide the case without the help of a jury, set closing arguments for May 6 at 1 pm.
This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit investigative newsroom.