Oswego Lake belongs to the people.
That’s according to Clackamas County Circuit Judge Ann Lininger, who ruled Tuesday that the body of water in the heart of the city of Lake Oswego is a public resource held by the state. The posh Portland suburb has long prohibited the public from splashing in the placid waters at the three lakeside parks accessible to anyone.
The decision does not immediately open the lake to public access, however, as Lininger has yet to decide whether the city’s 2012 resolution prohibiting park goers from entering the lake “unreasonably interferes with the people’s right of access.”
Lininger is expected to take up that question in July.
“Nothing has changed,” said Jeff Ward, general manager of the Lake Oswego Corporation, which has roughly 2,400 members who hold shares in the company or have easements on the lake. “There’s been no ruling granting public access. The city’s park rules are still in effect.”
Lininger’s 15-page ruling notes that Oswego Lake has been “functionally privatized,” as million-dollar homes surround nearly all of the lake’s 2.9-mile-long shoreline and the city has installed signs and barriers preventing access at its three lakeside parks.
City officials formally adopted a resolution banning public lake access at parks in 2012, citing liability issues, though signs prohibiting access had already been in place for some time.
Activists Mark Kramer, a kayaker, and Todd Prager, a swimmer, sued the city, state and Department of State Lands that year in a bid to enshrine the public right to navigate Oswego Lake.
The lawsuit took a winding path to the Oregon Supreme Court, which in 2020 sent the litigation back to Clackamas County Circuit Court to determine whether the lake was in fact owned by the state and held in the public trust.
Nadia Dahab, a lawyer for the activists, said Wednesday that she was pleased with Lininger’s “thoughtful decision.”
“We still have a lot of work to do before anything changes at Oswego Lake, but the court’s order recognizes, rightfully, that our state’s natural resources cannot be privatized — they exist for the public, and must be protected for public use,” Dahab said in a statement.
The lake, which is home to some of the Portland area’s pricest waterfront properties, was once much smaller.
Residents nearly doubled the lake’s size in the 1920s by blasting a basalt canal connecting the natural body of water, historically a source of fish and edible wapato roots for Native people, to Lakewood Bay.
Lininger said the public trust doctrine applies to the entire body of water, even though the activists haven’t yet established that the state owns the land beneath the expanded portion of the lake.
“There is no meaningful way to segregate the public trust water from the other water in the lake: it intermixes and flows together,” Lininger wrote in her ruling.
“To lightly hand over this precious public asset to private control at a time when fresh water is increasingly scarce and valuable ‘would be a great wrong,’” the judge added, quoting an earlier case.
The Oswego Lake Corporation opposes Lininger’s ruling.
“From our opinion, we’ve been upholding our own private property rights,” Ward said.
— Zane Sparling; zsparling@oregonian.com; 503-319-7083; @pdxzane
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Judge establishes ‘right of access’ to Oswego Lake, but Portland suburb’s ban on public lake use remains in e - OregonLive
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