Irrigation Empire: Paring Back Irrigation on the Platte

By David Hendee, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.

May 21–LINCOLN — Nebraska water regulators at the state and local level passed up chances a decade ago to limit groundwater irrigation development in the Platte River basin.

Now, a half-million additional acres later, the state must figure out how to pare back water use to the 1997 level.

It’s a multimillion-dollar question for taxpayers, as well as for the basin’s farmers and rural communities. State officials have estimated it will cost $54 million to $102 million by 2020.

“This isn’t going to be easy,” said Ann Bleed, director of the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources.

The state has a bit more time than it does in the Republican River basin to implement a solution — and the magnitude of overuse in the Platte is about a fifth of what the state faces in the Republican.

The Nebraska Legislature last month approved a cash fund pushed by Gov. Dave Heineman to help the state comply with interstate compacts and agreements and to reduce water use in troubled areas. Platte problems, however, will need more money than the cash fund alone can provide.

The predicament with the Platte goes back to 1997, when the state agreed to offset the impact of any future irrigation that removed water from the river.

But, for the most part, regulators didn’t stop farmers in the basin and its fringes from expanding irrigation operations. Over the next decade, irrigation was added to 508,000 acres, an area nearly the size of Lancaster County.

The reasons why they didn’t take action are a mix of water politics, weather and whistling in the dark as they denied the problem:

–The Nebraska Department of Water Resources (now the Department of Natural Resources) had no authority to require natural resources districts to stop issuing permits for new irrigation wells.

–The local NRDs had little authority to stop irrigation development that affected stream flows.

–State water officials were reluctant to ask the Nebraska Legislature to grant more regulatory authority to NRDs because it was politically tough to tangle with a major industry such as irrigated agriculture.

–It was a time of abundant rain. Aquifers were rising, Lake McConaughy was full, and flows in the Platte were strong. No one knew an eight-year drought was looming.

–Many policymakers, lawmakers and farmers chose not to believe that unfettered irrigation development carried risks.

“In some quarters, there was a lot of reluctance in the late 1990s to even talk about the issue,” said J. Michael Jess.

Jess was director of the State Water Resources Department when Nebraska signed a pact — commonly known as the Cooperative Agreement — with Colorado, Wyoming and the U.S. Interior Department to protect and enhance habitat for threatened and endangered species in central Nebraska.

Jess recalls asking his staff to compile a list simply summarizing the new irrigation wells drilled in the Platte basin during the first year of the agreement. Irrigators and others criticized the action as unnecessary.

The Cooperative Agreement evolved into the Platte River Recovery Program, signed last year. The program is designed to protect and enhance habitat for species such as whooping cranes, piping plovers and least terns.

The pact’s basic premise remains unchanged: Colorado and Wyoming agree to provide Platte water for habitat, while Nebraska provides land and consents not to use habitat water for irrigation.

Nonetheless, Nebraska farmers along the Platte were allowed to continue developing irrigation during most of the time the three states and the Interior Department were hammering out details of the recovery program.

Natural Resources Department lawyer Jim Cook sent a letter to every landowner who registered an irrigation well in the central and western Platte. The letters — nearly 4,400 of them — advised that the new wells someday could be regulated differently from older ones if the state determined that expanded irrigation lowered stream flows in the Platte River.

Even though the letters required no action, Cook braced for an outpouring of complaints from farmers — and was shocked when the letters were largely met with silence.

The region had about 2.6 million irrigated acres in 1997. By the end of 2005, when a new state water law stopped development, the official count topped 3.1 million acres.

Jess said some Platte basin communities, irrigation districts that relied on river water and others sounded alarms about irrigation growth.

“But they weren’t fire-drill volume,” he said.

State and local officials fully understood they were creating a future obligation for somebody — the state, the NRDs or water users themselves — to handle, said Roger Patterson, Jess’ successor, who was director of the State Natural Resources Department during most of the Platte negotiations.

“A lot of people thought somebody else was going to take care of it,” Patterson said.

But state law at the time didn’t authorize NRDs, the local government entities charged with regulating underground water, to limit groundwater irrigation development unless water tables were falling.

Cook, the resources department attorney who guided Nebraska through 13 years of negotiations leading to the Platte program, cited other reasons for inaction.

“It wasn’t a fruitful time to convince people we had trouble on the horizon,” Cook said. “There wasn’t the understanding or basis for doing much at that time.”

Water regulators didn’t fully understand the Platte’s unique geology and how water moves through the watershed.

Some NRD boards were reluctant to regulate groundwater irrigation because they weren’t convinced the Cooperative Agreement talks would yield the need for tight water restrictions.

“The districts were not in a good position under their law at the time — or the politics of the time — to take action to stop development,” Cook said.

One idea was for NRDs to challenge new irrigation development under the federal Endangered Species Act.

“But that would have been immediately challenged (by irrigators), with unknown results,” Cook said.

Not until drought settled over Nebraska and the West did people begin to soften their stances, Cook said. The drought, which began in 1999, eroded opposition to sustaining water in streams and aquifers.

“We started moving away from doing all this for the Endangered Species Act to thinking about doing it for our own reasons,” Cook said.

Patterson said that when then-Gov. Ben Nelson signed the Cooperative Agreement in 1997, Nebraska water regulators recognized that it marked a new era in water management. But they took no immediate action.

Wyoming and Colorado, with longer histories of water shortages in their stretches of the North Platte and South Platte Rivers, quickly stopped new irrigation development.

“We weren’t there yet,” Patterson said.

The growing number of irrigated acres made Patterson nervous, he said.

“We recognized we’d have to come to grips with the problem at some point,” he said, “but we never had clarity on how.”

Legislative Bill 962 in 2004 was part of the answer.

Patterson and State Sen. Ed Schrock of Elm Creek used the drought and Nebraska’s water obligations to other states in the Platte and Republican Rivers to win legislative approval of a law setting up joint state and local management of surface water and groundwater in troubled areas.

Solutions in the Platte will be hard, divisive and expensive if what’s happening in the Republican River basin across southern Nebraska repeats in central and western Nebraska.

People in the Republican basin are struggling to reduce the amount of water used for crops while sustaining their irrigated-agriculture economy.

“The Republican is a bellwether for what could happen in the Platte,” Bleed said.

In less than 20 months — by Jan. 1, 2009 — Nebraska must have a plan in place to shave its water use in the Platte to the amount used July 1, 1997.

Part of the challenge has been determining the size of the problem.

The Natural Resources Department requires new irrigation wells to be registered, but not all farmers bothered to do it.

County tax assessors require irrigated fields to be identified, but not all farmers bothered to do that.

LB 962 gave farmers an incentive: Irrigated property now must be certified with the local NRD or it doesn’t officially exist and can’t be protected from possible irrigation restrictions later.

A coalition of NRDs, public power districts, state agencies, cities, statewide farm and irrigation groups, and environmental organizations launched a study in 1998 to understand the Platte basin’s hydrological and geological conditions.

This Cooperative Hydrology Study is known as COHYST. Last fall a COHYST report identified an estimated number of post-1997 acres developed for irrigation and their effect on stream flows in the Platte.

Well-drilling moratoriums are now in place in the Platte basin upstream from Chapman, in the COHYST area of central and western Nebraska. But no decisions have been made on how to roll back the impact of the added irrigation. Possibilities include pumping restrictions and voluntary buyouts of irrigators.

Regulators will first target about 72,000 of the new acres in a key, “overappropriated” area nearest to the Platte and in some of the watershed between Elm Creek and Chapman — places where irrigation pumping has the greatest effect on depleting stream flows.

Studies indicate these acres could cause an annual depletion to the river of 26,900 acre-feet. An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an acre 1 foot deep. For perspective, more than 1.1 million acre-feet of Platte water flows past Grand Island each year.

With the Republican, the state is an estimated 136,000 acre-feet in arrears to Kansas.

The Nebraska Legislature targeted problems in the Republican with Legislative Bill 701, but the new law, signed this month, also includes long-term funding to cut back water use in the Platte and elsewhere.

The law’s Water Resources Cash Fund will tap $2.7 million a year from state sales and income tax revenue and hopes to add $300,000 a year in grants from the Nebraska Environmental Trust. Roughly $8 million a year will be added to the fund from fees paid by corn and sorghum farmers, beginning in 2012.

The Natural Resources Department will decide how to allocate the statewide fund.

The Platte was the focus of debate last year over whether Nebraska should sign on to the recovery program. Then attention turned to the Republican basin.

“We feel a little bit like the stepchild here,” said Tim Anderson, a spokesman for the Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District, which owns and operates Lake McConaughy. “The Republican is getting all of the attention.”

Jack Maddux, a Wauneta rancher and member of the state’s Water Policy Task Force, wonders whether most Nebraskans realize that the Platte’s problems will soon return to the spotlight.

“Issues in the Platte,” he said, “will be every bit as serious as the Republican.”

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Copyright (c) 2007, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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