Water task force seeks consensus

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BY ART HOVEY/Lincoln Journal Star

KEARNEY — About 100 people, including most of the 49 members of Gov. Mike Johanns' Water Policy Task Force, wedged themselves into a room here Tuesday to try to decide where Nebraska goes next with sweeping changes in water policy.

Roger Patterson, director of the state Department of Natural Resources, and state Sen. Ed Schrock of Elm Creek, chairman of the Legislature's Natural Resources Committee, co-chair a policy group they said is unified on the need to control irrigation development in the growing part of the state where water demand is outpacing supply.

But a mood of unity was not always easy to see during a daylong meeting gripped by the tensions that accompany a new law.

LB962, drafted by the policy group and passed during the 2004 legislative session, allows the state to tell 23 natural resources districts when river basins are overappropriated and when irrigation demand from underground wells must be rolled back.

Jack Maddux of Wauneta lasted only about an hour with his personal pledge to say nothing unless it was something positive.

"I've come to the conclusion that the NRDs don't have the political courage to solve groundwater problems at the local level," said Maddux, an at-large member of a board drawn from the ranks of those NRDs, as well as power districts, municipalities, general agriculture, recreation, environmental groups and irrigators.

"I think it is a very serious problem that we face," Maddux said.

One of the major dimensions of that problem is a settlement with Kansas that requires minimum flows in the Republican River as it crosses the border between the two states.

But tensions and troubles run a lot deeper at a time when drought-impacted rivers and reservoirs are getting shallower.

n Virtually all of the Nebraska Panhandle and much of the south-central part of the state are already considered overappropriated or fully appropriated, according to a state study.

n Water users are trying to adjust to policy based on the widely held assumption that surface water and groundwater are hydrologically connected. That means heavier groundwater irrigation is often at the expense of surface flows.

n The NRDs were established in the 1970s as the local controllers of groundwater use. Now their board members see the state asserting greater influence in that area.

"I can tell you adamantly that the state doesn't want to control your water," Schrock told local-control listeners Tuesday.

The state found itself under legal pressure from Kansas.

"They didn't sue the NRDs," he said. "That's the reason the state of Nebraska got involved."

But now that the state is involved, under LB962, the NRDs must work with Patterson and his staff to develop integrated management plans whenever river basins meet or exceed an equilibrium point between supply and demand.

From that point forward, if irrigation use grows at the local level, it must be decreased elsewhere within those same local boundaries.

The state is already working with nine of the 23 NRDs on management plans.

"When you've appropriated all the water, it's like selling land,"Patterson said. "The only way somebody else can buy land is if somebody is willing to sell."

Put more bluntly, he said, "if you're going to add something, then something else needs to go away."

Part of Tuesday's discussion was about the chances of full, $4.7 million funding from the 2005 Legislature for the task force.

"We've always had 100 percent support from the governor," Schrock said, "and I do appreciate that."

At a later point, the focus turned to federal, state and local programs that could pay producers to take land out of irrigation and ease the strains on several of the state's 13 river basins. But the policy group is grappling with who should pay irrigators willing to reduce water use when federal money runs out.

How much of the burden should fall on other irrigators in the same NRD? How much — if any — should fall to all irrigators, all farmers, all local taxpayers, all of the state's taxpayers?

"Some would say the state caused the problem," said Schrock, referring to the Republican River settlement with Kansas. "They should have to pay for it. I think that's an oversimplification."

Much of the resistance to new water policy comes from the 1,000-plus members of Nebraskans First, a coalition of groundwater irrigators. President Bob Hilger of David City, on hand for Tuesday's task force meeting, said LB962 "wasn't well-thought out."

"It's not going to work," he said.

Hilger also took issue with Maddux's assessment of NRDs' past performance: "I can't believe anybody in Nebraska would feel that way."

The Alma-based Lower Republican Natural Resources District is on record as opposed to LB962. One of its board members, Nelson Trambley of Campbell, continued to find fault with a water policy direction that diminishes local control.

"This will affect our economy terribly down there," Trambley said.

Reach Art Hovey at (402) 523-4949 or ahovey@alltel.net.