3.2.05
Midlands Voices: Water policies slight municipal residents
Omaha World-Heraldby: Gary Person, City of Sidney city manager and director of Economic Development
Last week's hearing on Legislative Bill 708 before the Legislature's Natural Resource Committee on municipal domestic water needs turned into another NRD lovefest.
The water needs of people who live in western Nebraska communities and are served by public water-supply systems continue to rank near the bottom of the water-priority list.
We'd feel better treated if we were a doormat in a barnyard. Certainly if we were an ear of corn or we lived in a feedlot, we'd rate far more importance.
Municipal residents rank just barely above those evil people who own businesses and industries that create jobs. They are at the very bottom of the priority list.
All other water uses, especially rural irrigation use, are the only priority Nebraska seems to have. After all, those rural users get 97 percent of the groundwater across the state and about 99 percent of it in our region.
In the LB 708 hearing, we heard NRD manager after NRD manager from across Nebraska testify how wonderful the Natural Resources District system has worked since it was created 30-some years ago.
These managers told the committee how they hold hands with all of their constituents and champion the cause of communities with water challenges, helping them find solutions. I wish the committee had handed out barf bags. I was in dire need of one.
Municipal representatives who drove hundreds of miles from communities like Kimball and Bridgeport were given two quick minutes to state their case and promptly told to return home.
To date, this wonderful NRD system has allowed Sidney's water source to become nitrate-contaminated from many years of overuse of anhydrous ammonia by area irrigators. Then it became dangerously depleted from the proliferation of NRD-unregulated irrigation-pivot development and water use. This watershed had only served Sidney for 140 years.
So by law and critical need, Sidney had no choice but to fix the problem and develop a new well field. To date, it has spent $16.8 million, and the bills keep mounting. The NRD took every opportunity to throw more obstacles in the city's way as we developed the water project - escalating the costs by another million dollars.
Meanwhile, those who created this problem with failed policies, abuse of power and mismanagement have zero financial accountability toward the near $17 million cost.
The Social Security grandma has to pay $420 a year just for the right to have water and flush her toilet. Then she can pay the highest Nebraska water rates for every ounce that she uses over and above that -- a rate that has escalated by 400 percent the past three years.
As one brilliant NRD board member recently analyzed in a public meeting, "It's because you (Sidney) are stealing others' water."
Yet the lame excuse is given that we cannot monitor irrigation pivots in the South Platte NRD until there is a tax-subsidized program to pay for the irrigation meters on the tax-subsidized pivots.
The $550 cost share apparently is a hardship on the irrigation interests.
What took Mother Nature billions of years to put in place on Mother Earth has been put into serious jeopardy across the western two-thirds of Nebraska in just 35 short years of center-pivot irrigation. Rivers, streams, creeks, lakes and habitats across Nebraska are being destroyed, and the aquifers are being seriously threatened.
There are thousands of responsible farmers carrying on the tradition of their forefathers. They are just as concerned as municipalities are about the greed grab for water by a handful.
During this reign of water terror on Nebraska's present and future generations, the NRDs were entrusted with the responsibility of being Nebraska's groundwater guardians. I'll let that profound statement speak for itself.
Yes, what a wonderful NRD lovefest we have had. No wonder the Legislature now has rewarded the NRDs for their many efforts by making them the Supreme Water Gods through LB 962.
The fox guarding the henhouse now has supreme powers over those evil municipal users and job creators. Even though those public water-supply users have been accountable for every ounce of water they have ever used and paid for that use, that use now can be conditioned and deemed discretionary.
Every time we express concerns to state officials, we get the State Water Policy Task Force solution thrown back into our face. Did you know the only two municipal representatives on this 49-member statewide task force who actually represent communities affected by LB 962 are two city councilmen who just happen to own irrigation pivots?
This is just another validation regarding the consistent way of thinking when it comes to creating Nebraska's water policies.
This philosophy would have us eliminate those businesses that created those 6,400 taxpaying jobs in Sidney so that we could grow one more pivot of corn with the same amount of water that would be saved.