EDITORIAL: Nebraska’s water plan shouldn’t include sucking from the South Platte

For years, now, Coloradans have been working tirelessly to stretch the precious water resources we have. Whether a burgeoning population is a blessing or a curse or a little of both is immaterial; it is very real and it is ongoing.

After decades of us-vs.-them infighting, urban against rural, east against west, this watershed against another, Coloradans have learned to work together to make the most of our pitiful precipitation. For the first time ever, a water conservancy district and a municipal water and sanitation district have joined hands for a mutually beneficial water project, a monumental step forward in water relations.

From the brick-in-the-toilet Boulder County of the 1980s to the push to xeriscape across the Denver metro area, Coloradans have looked for and found ways to stretch their water. Irrigators no longer flood their fields or fling great gouts of water through the air, but sprinkle exactly what’s needed down in the crop where it can be used. Municipalities want to recycle water as often as they can before releasing it downstream. Millions of dollars and decades of work have gone into such projects as the Windy Gap Firming Project and the Northern Integrated Supply Project, complex arrangements meant to squeeze every drop out of the Colorado Big Thompson project and the Poudre River while maintaining recreational, irrigation and drinking water for the northern Front Range.

All of this in the face of climate change, and Coloradans are facing even that challenge with new ideas, new engineering, new technology.

And in Nebraska? Not so much, really.

One thing Nebraskans know how to do is punch holes in the ground and suck water out of the Ogallala Aquifer. And now they want to punch a hole in the South Platte River – in Colorado, mind you – and suck water out of the river we have worked so hard to build.

Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts has announced that he’s asking the state’s legislature to fund a century-old scheme that would pull water out of the South Platte River near Ovid, Colo., and ditch it 35 miles east, out of the South Platte watershed. And that’s 35 miles as the crow flies; anyone who knows anything about gravity-fed water canals knows they wander for miles trying to find lower elevations.

Colorado developed a statewide water plan that it unveiled in 2015, and already projects are being explored that fit the criteria outlined in that water plan. Yes, it’s been seven years, but in the glacial time frame of all things water, that’s just moments.

Nebraska’s water plan, on the other hand … well, Nebraska doesn’t really have a statewide water plan. The most creative thing Nebraska can think of to assure its water supply for the future is to suck it out of Colorado.

Colorado and Nebraska agreed 99 years ago just how much water is theirs and how much is ours. Yes, the Perkins County Canal project is specifically allowed by that 1923 water compact. But a lot has changed since then. Environmental protections and wildlife habitat preservation have become important American values. Conserving, recycling, reusing all are now part of how we Americans want our natural resources exploited. And in Colorado, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

If some of our plans to secure our water future scare Nebraskans, perhaps they should do what we do; work harder and work smarter to preserve what they have. Quit poking holes in the ground to sustain an agricultural model that no longer works. Make do, as we have, with the water that comes down the river, and stretch it to cover their needs.

We are certain that, should Nebraska try to stick a straw in the South Platte in Colorado, we will find a way to plug that straw.