Neb. ‘overly optimistic’ about canal
Conservancy board members still left with more questions than answers
Colorado water experts have said Nebraskans are overly optimistic about the success of their proposed Perkins County Canal, and a recent presentation by promoters of the project has done nothing to change that opinion.
The presentation, made last week to the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program’s Water Advisory Committee, was the focus of Tuesday’s Lower South Platte Water Conservancy District board meeting. Lower’s General Manager Joe Frank told his board Colorado needs to have its own consultant analyze the proposed project and render an opinion on feasibility.
The Perkins Canal would divert water from the South Platte River near Ovid, Colo., to a storage site somewhere in Nebraska. The South Platte River Compact, ratified by both states and Congress in 1923, authorizes Nebraska to build the canal, along with the right to use the power of eminent domain to acquire land on which to build it.
The idea that Nebraska might actually build the canal has water users in the lower reaches of the river worried that doing so could disrupt decades of water augmentation that helps Colorado meet the terms of the 1923 compact.
Colorado’s main concerns about the canal center on return flows — water that has been diverted upriver and eventually returns to the river through the ground — and the PRRIP, which depends on those return flows to maintain wildlife habitat in the Big Bend area of the Platte between Cozad and Grand Island in Nebraska.
Frank said the presentation, the content of which he showed the board, contains numerous errors and misrepresentations. For instance, the document references two water storage projects in Colorado that Nebraska
says would prevent water from flowing out of Colorado. The problem is, two of those projects — Chimney Hollow and an expansion of Gross Reservoir — are to capture water from Colorado’s Western Slope and would, eventually, increase the water available in the South Platte Basin.
The presentation also claims that, without the canal, Colorado’s increased “consumptive use” of excess river flows will mean the river will deliver only the mandated 120 cubic feet per second at the state line. Colorado water officials have repeatedly said it is impossible to siphon off all of the excess flows that occur during spring runoff and the occasional flooding that occurs in Colorado.
Frank told the board a Perkins Canal Workgroup has been assembled with participants from Lower, the Platte River Partnership and Water District 1, which is the reach of the river upriver from the Lower district’s boundaries.