Water court logjam

“All is not well when it comes to water court,” said John Meininger, an attorney who represents irrigation well owners along the South Platte River. Some of his clients, he said, have been waiting five years for a final decision.

Meininger’s comments came at a public hearing designed to gather information on where problems lie within Colorado’s water court system. The Colorado Supreme Court is conducting an eight-month review of the system after a task force appointed last summer by Gov. Bill Ritter asked it to do so. A final report is due Aug. 1. 

Full story Rocky Mountain News

Denver Post Blogs on Yuma County DOW shut-out

Birds or Fish - What’ll it be?

Rarely has such a question like the one floating over eastern Colorado been posed to sportsmen. On one hand, we have the Colorado Division of Wildlife striving mightily to protect the water source for its hatchery at Wray, where 40 per cent of the state’s warmwater fish are raised. But involvement in a lawsuit involving these surface water rights puts the wildlife agency at odds with local farmers whose water wells–and livelihoods–could be shut down if DOW and the other plaintiffs prevail.

The immediate result of the controversy has been a landowner uprising in the form of a threatened lockout of pheasant hunters during the 2008 season. The rooster rebellion has its focus in Yuma County, scene of of the water fight in the North Republican River basin. But it also has spread among sympathetic landowners in neighboring counties. More than 300,000 acres has been pledged to a lockout that also threatens landowner participation in the popoular Walk-In hunter access program.

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Colorado’s solution in pipeline

Story from OmahaNewsstand

As Nebraska and Kansas water czars wade closer to non-binding arbitration to settle troubles over sharing Republican River water, Colorado is moving ahead with plans to divert itself out of the fray.

“Frankly, when you’re in a hole, you need to stop digging deeper,” said Ken Knox, deputy state engineer for the Colorado Division of Water Resources.

This week, Knox and his boss, Dick Wolfe, the state engineer, hope to convince their Nebraska and Kansas counterparts that Colorado’s pipeline plan is a viable solution to that state’s share of basin water problems.

“I can’t make it rain,” Knox said, explaining the necessity of building a $71 million pipeline to the Nebraska border and pumping underground water into the Republican River.

The bulk of the cost went to buying water rights on about 9,600 acres of farmland on Colorado’s eastern plains. Colorado paid more than $50 million, or $5,300 an acre.

A 13-mile pipeline and infrastructure is budgeted at $21 million. Construction is expected to begin later this year.

The project is financed by a $14.50 tax per irrigated acre on landowners in the Republican River Water Conservation District around the streams that create the river’s headwaters.

Colorado shares water rights on the Republican, a 550-mile river that flows from the eastern Plains across part of southern Nebraska and into part of northern Kansas. The river provides water for irrigation, drinking, recreation and other uses in those three states. Its use is governed by a 1943 compact among the three states that allocates 49 percent to Nebraska, 40 percent to Kansas and 11 percent to Colorado.

Kansas says Nebraska and Colorado continue to use more than their share of the river basin water in violation of water use rules spelled out by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2002 settlement of a Kansas-instigated lawsuit.

The states could be headed back to the high court.

Colorado’s Wolfe, Nebraska’s Ann Bleed and Kansas’ David Barfield plan to meet Tuesday and Wednesday in Kansas City, Mo., in a special meeting of the Republican River Compact Administration.

The meeting was forced when Barfield submitted Kansas’s dispute with Nebraska to the compact administration as a fasttrack issue in February.

Kansas formally declared in December that Nebraska significantly consumed more than its share of Republican River water from 2003 through 2006. Farmers use the vast majority of water pumped out of the basin to irrigate crops. Excessive usage violates the compact that allocates Republican water among the three basin states.

Barfield proposed that Nebraska cease pumping from all irrigation wells within 2.5 miles of the Republican and its tributaries and from wells added after 2000. He also demands that Nebraska pay unspecified monetary damages.

Nebraska state and local water officials oppose Barfield’s remedy as inefficient and likely to have a devastating economic impact on farmers and communities.

Bleed, Barfield and Wolfe are the compact administration’s only members. If they don’t resolve the dispute with a unanimous vote during this week’s meetings, Kansas is expected to invoke nonbinding arbitration.

“We’re all to agree. If not, I assume we’ll be in arbitration,” Bleed said.

If arbitration fails, Barfield has said Kansas would sue Nebraska in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bleed is expected to defend Nebraska’s attempts to remedy its overuse of the river water. These include reducing groundwater pumping by farmers and buying river water from irrigators who hold rights to the flows and release it downstream to Kansas.

Nebraska’s state and local water managers have informally discussed following Colorado’s pipeline example and pumping water into the Republican near Guide Rock, where the river flows into Kansas.

But such river augmentation projects aren’t yet part of Nebraska’s working list of remedies for its troubles with Kansas.

Knox said Colorado, like Nebraska, wrestles with how to meet its water obligations to its downstream neighbors without damaging the rural economy.

“It’s simplistic, but what Nebraska and Kansas choose to do or not do is their business,” he said. “We’re trying to get our house in order.”

The pipeline project is one tool Colorado can use to comply with the compact.

“We’re looking at this issue with binoculars,” Knox said. “The pipeline helps us immediately — during the next 10 to 20 years — but I’m mindful that we need to prepare for the period 20 to 100 years from now.”

Groundwater Levels Rise in South-Central Kansas, Drop in Western Counties

Groundwater levels rose in south-central Kansas this year as levels in the western part of the state continued a downward trend according to preliminary data compiled by the Kansas Geological Survey, based at the University of Kansas.

Landowners boycott DOW over water fight

“It will be hunting for friends and family only,” declared Don Brown.

The Denver Post  picked up on the Yuma Pioneer story about local landowners pledging to boycott all Colorado Division of Wildlife programs because of its participation on a lawsuit that would shut down irrigation wells. The landowners in the boycott would ban pheasant hunters and other DOW activities on their land.

 In a swelling protest against Colorado Division of Wildlife participation in a lawsuit that pits rights to surface water against irrigation wells, hundreds of farmers have joined in what amounts to a boycott of the 2008 pheasant season.

Landowners in Yuma County, center of the protest, pledged 340,000 acres to the boycott. Supporters in Kit Carson, Washington and Phillips counties have contributed lesser amounts in what has become a literal groundswell of remonstration. Wildlife managers fear the lockout will spread to other parts of pheasant country.

“We feel betrayed. For years we’ve fed the birds, fed the deer, planted the trees and grasses DOW wanted,” Brown said. “Now they file this action, and, if they win, they’ll bankrupt Yuma County. There’ll be nothing left. We can’t pay for our schools and hospitals.”

  Story

Rural economies tied to water

“We have to understand that agriculture is the fiber of the state. We’re challenged as a state with agriculture as to how we preserve that tradition for our children.”  - Colorado Governor Ritter at 17th Annual Governor’s Forum  on Colorado Agriculture

Water politics

Water Politics from the Ground Up

A new report from Western Progress with a new report [pdf] authored by water law experts Denise Fort and Lawrence MacDonnell and informed by a bevy of water and policy experts.  This article contains an eight-point set of solutions to the problem.

New West Politics: Voice of the Rocky Mountains

“More and more, we are seeing a realization across the West that the conservation and sustainability of water is essential to our future,” said Lawrence MacDonnell, co-author of A New Western Water Agenda, a policy report out today from Western Progress, “this report seeks to extend existing efforts across the entire region and also suggest new ways of tackling increasing scarcity.”
“The status quo simply won’t work,” said Denise Fort, the other co-author of the report and a professor at the University of New Mexico Law School, “we must find new ways in decrease our use of the limited water supply we face in the West.”

Until relatively recently, it has been possible to identify sources of water not yet committed to some other, legally-protected use and develop these sources to meet new demands. We could store spring runoff and not interfere with summertime direct flow diversions. We could withdraw ground water without impairing surface water uses or other ground water uses.

It is increasingly difficult to find water sources that are not already committed to another use. We have dammed most rivers to capture high flows and to recapture water for subsequent use. We have tapped ground water at rates well beyond the ability of aquifers to recharge, so water levels have dropped and associated surface water has declined.

Future of water in the west

New York Times article October 2007

“. . . . The biggest issue is that agriculture consumes most of the water, as much as 90 percent of it, in a state like Colorado. ‘The West has gone from a fur-trapping, to a mining, to an agricultural, to a manufacturing, to an urban-centric economy,’ . . . . As the region evolved, however, its water ownership for the most part did not.  . . . “

Republican River Basin Issues Subject of March 5 Conference

Mike Petersen, formerly NRCS Soil Scientist, who helped the Yuma Conservation District with its Water and Nutrient Management Project, is slated to speak at this conference. 

From the McCook Daily Gazette:  “Making Cent$ of Every Drop … ” is a conference geared toward area producers and business people looking for a greater understanding of what’s going on in the Republican River Basin today. The workshop will be Wednesday, March 5, at the Red Willow County Fairgrounds Community Building in McCook. Registration will open at 8:30 a.m., with sessions running from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. CST; the conference is free and no pre-registration is necessary.

McCook Daily News 

Pipeline for the Republican River Compact

Robbing Peter to pay Paul . . from a non-renewable resource and funded by irrigated farmers

From the Sterling Journal Advocate Sat., Feb. 12, 2008

“On Jan. 22, RRWCD (Republican River Water Conservation District) signed the second of two contracts to purchase designated ground water rights that will produce nearly 15,000 acre-feet of water per year for a Compact Compliance pipeline. The pipeline project, if constructed, will deliver water to the North Fork of the Republican River at the Colorado-Nebraska line, to assist Colorado in complying with the Republican River Compact.

“Also on Jan. 22, the Colorado Water Conservation Board voted unanimously to approve a $60 million loan application by the RRWCD with a 2 percent interest rate over 20 years, to finance the Pipeline project. The loan still requires approval by the Colorado General Assembly, but the application has cleared a major hurdle.

“To assure the Colorado Water Conservation Board that the RRWCD could repay the loan, the RRWCD Board of Directors voted to increase 2008 use fees from $5.50 to $14.50 per irrigated acre on irrigation diversions…….

“In its prior efforts to assist Colorado in complying with the Compact, the RRWCD board reviewed other options, including a project to import water from the South Platte River basin, proposed by South Platte Resources LLC. But the board concluded that the South Platte project would cost three to four times more than the Pipeline project using existing designated ground water rights.

“The South Platte project would also be twice as expensive to operate on an annual basis, and would require a minimum of three to four years to obtain approval of the Division 1 Water Court for a change of use of the water rights offered in the proposal. This would not be in time to prevent curtailment of diversions in the basin.

“ . . . .The RRWCD believes it was fortunate to secure these rights, which are located in a deep, productive part of the Ogallala Aquifer.”