Stan Ley, OSU Facilities plumber, is passionate about improving the taste, quality and safety of drinking water on campus.

“Corvallis city water is good water,” Ley said. “It’s as clean as any standard municipality in the US. But as the water goes through older buildings it picks up rust, sediment, you name it.”

While many buildings are rescheduled for re-piping, filters can be a good stop-gap measure to keep water clean and drinkable.

The systems used to filter the water include two filters, a cotton pre-filter that stops particles down to one micron in size, and a solid carbon filter that gets down to a half micron in filtration, often used for scientific or medical purposes to purify water.

“It reduces heavy metals, bad taste, some bacteria,” he said. “It cleans it out much cleaner than it comes out of the pipes.”

The filters, which can be changed out every eight to 12 months, cost $7 for the pre-filter and $23 for the carbon filter.

“That’s very reasonable considering a lot of folks are buying five-gallon water coolers, and then you’ve got a machine you’ve got to rinse,” Ley said.

When water is run through the filters, it’s sweet, Ley said.

“This water is as clean as any bottled water you’d buy anywhere,” he said.

To request a filtration system installation, contact Facilities Services at 541-737-2969.

~ Theresa Hogue

The honor comes at a great time because there has been declining funding from the state to plant new trees on campus, said Joe Majeski, OSU’s landscape manager. He hopes that the Tree Campus USA designation would provide the recognition that could lead to even more grants.

OSU has about 5,000 trees on campus, and typically plants 20 to 50 new trees per year, Majeski said. “The university is committed to planting as many trees as we can in appropriate spots.”

OSU received 100 new trees from the Arbor Day Foundation last week in conjunction with the Tree Campus designation.
“This is actually a brand-new program. We just put it together earlier this year,” said Jennifer Boettcher, program manager for the Arbor Day Foundation.

About 35 new trees became part of the campus Thursday, and the rest will be planted over the next several weeks.

City Councilor Jeanne Raymond helped shovel dirt on lilac trees planted along Orchard Avenue. She said trees are critically important to OSU, and not just for the environmental benefits.

“This adds to the community and the beauty,” she said, adding that one of her friends decided to attend OSU partly because of the ambiance that the trees bring to the campus.

“This is about the only place you can get monster trees; here and in the parks,” said Charlotte Pritchard, a full-time groundskeeper for OSU. She mentioned a red oak in the Memorial Union Quad that spreads out over nearly a full acre.

“You aren’t going to see that in someone’s yard,” she said.

OSU met five required core standards of tree care and community engagement in order to receive the Tree Campus USA status: a campus tree advisory committee, a campus tree-care plan, verification of dedicated annual expenditures on the campus tree-care plan, celebrating Arbor Day and instituting a service learning project aimed at engaging students.