Nebraska orders Republican River water release

LINCOLN — A Nebraska irrigation district official worries that his area’s next corn crop has been jeopardized by a state order to tap reservoirs so Nebraska can send enough water downriver to Kansas.

Nebraska is trying to comply with the 1943 Republican River Compact, which dictates that Nebraska gets 49 percent of the Republican River’s water, Kansas gets 40 percent and Colorado gets 11 percent.

Frenchman-Cambridge Irrigation District general manager Brad Edgerton wasn’t happy with the state ordering extra releases from four federal reservoirs that collect tributary and runoff from the river basin. Edgerton told the Lincoln Journal Star that the releases further threaten south-central Nebraska’s 2013 corn crop as the entire state struggles with drought.

“And if the state can take our water this way, I don’t know how we exist,” Edgerton said.

His district may be able to deliver to irrigators only 2 inches of water per acre during the growing season along one of its canals and 1.5 inches in another, Edgerton said. Typical releases have been 8 inches.

District customers now will be left to the mercy of the weather and whether they already have access to sufficient groundwater. New wells in most of the river basin have been barred since a 2002 Kansas-Nebraska settlement of a lawsuit filed in 1998, Natural Resources Department deputy director Jim Schneider told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Kansas has repeatedly complained that Nebraska has used more than its share. Another Kansas lawsuit alleging that Nebraska violated the compact is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

To comply with the compact, in January the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources declared 2013 a “compact call year” and issued what are known as “closing notices.” The notices barred river water diversion into direct irrigation or storage. The compact call also required natural resources districts in the basin to take certain other measures to increase the river’s flow. For example, said Schneider, the Imperial-based Upper Republican Natural Resources District started pumping groundwater into the river and likely will continue that for the rest of the year.

Then on Monday the department ordered the reservoirs to release a total of 12,000 acre-feet of water by the end of April. An acre-foot is enough water to cover an acre of ground with a foot of water — about 326,000 gallons, or enough to meet the average needs of two Nebraska families.

“We don’t know for sure that (the 12,000 acre-feet) is a sufficient amount, but that’s the start of what we’re going to provide,” said Schneider.

Rain remains the key. Without it, Schneider said, the state may be forced to require additional releases from the reservoirs.