Colorado, Nebraska jostle over water rights amid drought
Shortly after daybreak on the high plains of northeastern Colorado, Don Schneider tinkers with seed-dispensing gear on a mammoth corn planter. The day’s task: Carefully sowing hundreds of acres of seed between long rows of last year’s desiccated stalks to ensure the irrigation water he’s collected over the winter will last until harvest time.
A two-hour’s drive eastward, Steve Hanson, a fifthgeneration Nebraska cattle breeder who also produces corn and other crops, is preparing to seed, having stored winter water to help ensure his products make it to market. Like Schneider and countless others in this semi-arid region, he wants his children and grandchildren to be able to work the rich soil homesteaded by their ancestors in the 1800s.
Schneider and Hanson find themselves on opposite sides of a looming, politically-fraught dispute over water resembling the kind that until now has been reserved for the parched U.S. states along the Colorado River Basin.
As climate change-fueled megadrought edges eastward, Nebraska’s Republican-controlled Legislature this year voted to move forward with a plan that stunned Colorado state leaders. The Cornhusker State wants to divert water in Colorado by invoking an obscure, 99-year-old compact between the states that allows Nebraska to seize Colorado land along the South Platte River to build a canal.
Nebraska’s plan underscores an increasing appetite throughout the West to preemptively secure water as winter snows and yearround rainfall diminish, forcing states to reallocate increasingly scarce flows in basins such as the South Platte and its better-known cousin, the Colorado River.
Nebraska’s Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, gave precious few details in calling for $500 million in cash reserves and one-time federal pandemic funds to be spent on the project, other than to say it will benefit agriculture, power generation and municipal drinking water. Ricketts decried proposals in Colorado to either siphon or store more South Platte water, especially in the rapidly-growing Denver metro area, saying they threaten Nebraska’s water rights hundreds of miles downstream.
The announcement sent Colorado officials scrambling to dust off the 1923 compact, which both Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court signed off on and still stands as the law of the land. Democratic Gov. Jared Polis vowed to “aggressively assert” Colorado’s water rights, and state lawmakers lambasted the proposal. GOP Rep. Richard Holtorf, an area cattleman, declared: “You give Nebraska what they’re due but you don’t give them much else.”
For now, Colorado is not going to legally challenge Nebraska’s right to a canal under the compact, said Kevin Rein, Colorado’s state engineer and director of the Colorado Division of Water Resources. “The other side of that coin is that we’ll make every effort that their operation is in compliance with the compact” and protects Colorado’s rights, Rein said.
The South Platte meanders 380 miles from the Rocky Mountains through the Colorado town of Julesburg at the Nebraska line. Depending on the season, it can seemingly disappear in parts, only to re-emerge downstream. It can become a torrent with heavy snowmelt or flooding. Cottonwood trees line its banks and sandbars create the illusion that it consists of multiple creeks in many places.
The compact allows Nebraska to build a canal to claim 500 cubic feet (more than 3,700 gallons) per second between mid-October and April, the non-irrigation season.
Nebraska’s Legislature allocated $53.5 million for an engineering study for the project, which as originally envisioned under the compact would begin somewhere near Schneider’s farm in Ovid and run at least 24 miles into Nebraska’s Perkins County, where Hanson’s operations are headquartered.