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The Cost of Complacency
Complacency in the face of a rapidly changing water picture in the West has big costs – including the threat of state governments stepping in when local entities refuse to embrace reality.
One of the best illustrations is seen to our east, in southwest Kansas (along its border with Colorado), where frustrations with inaction – and the resulting threat to the regional economy – are reaching the boiling point.
Recent media reports have detailed the inaction of the water district that has, for decades, refused to confront the decline in the Ogallala Aquifer (one of the world’s largest aquifers).
Despite numerous red flags, the director of the water district, who has been in his job for 20 years, has spent little on conservation strategies, much less on a comprehensive plan to protect his largely agricultural customer base.
He has spent big bucks on staff salaries, office furniture, and other amenities.
Sound like any water entity in Douglas County?
Media reports detailed Kansas legislators’ frustrations with a half century of “studies, discussions and hand-wringing about the aquifer’s decline.”
The legislature stepped in to force an action plan. This set off a scramble to have locals find a path forward, before the state imposes its own.
This is a real-time, real-world scenario of the cost of complacency. It is neither a scare tactic nor a hypothetical scenario.
Fortunately, in the case of the Denver Aquifer – also facing excess demand and the subject of calls by experts to reduce reliance on it – there is time to act.
That’s why Douglas County’s leaders are embracing this reality and developing a detailed countywide water plan.
Let’s not end up like the entrenched Kansas water bureaucrat who is scrambling to save his job and his community – before the state brings the hammer down.
Recent Headlines
‘Time for a reckoning.’ Kansas farmers brace for water cuts to save Ogallala Aquifer.
After decades of local inaction, Kansas lawmakers are pushing for big changes in irrigation.
... It’s spring in southwest Kansas, a hub for the nation’s crop, dairy and beef industries.
As the familiar seasonal rhythm plays out, some farmers are bracing for major changes in how they use the long-depleting Ogallala Aquifer. The nation’s largest underground store of fresh water, the Ogallala transformed this arid region into an agricultural powerhouse.
After 50 years of studies, discussions and hand-wringing about the aquifer’s decline, the state is demanding that local groundwater managers finally enforce conservation. But in this region where water is everything, they’ll have to overcome entrenched attitudes and practices that led to decades of overpumping.
Tens of millions of acres of cropland lie abandoned, study shows
The biggest changes took place around the Ogallala Aquifer, whose groundwater irrigates parts of numerous states, including Colorado, Texas, and Wyoming.
About 30 million acres of U.S. cropland have been abandoned since the 1980s, a new analysis suggests. The study, published in Environmental Research Letters, offers a detailed look at land with immense environmental and economic potential — land that, researchers write, was abandoned at a rate of over a million acres a year between 1986 and 2018.
…The biggest changes took place around the Ogallala Aquifer, whose groundwater irrigates parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming, and which has been drying out because of excessive pumping and droughts.
Groundwater in the Colorado River Basin will struggle to recover from warming temperatures, study shows
…The Colorado River Basin is megadrought country, Overpeck said, based on centuries of historical records. Research shows one megadrought lasted 80 years; the current megadrought started in 2000.
“We haven’t, as climate scientists, thought as carefully about groundwater as we should,” Overpeck said. “We’re depleting the groundwater, but Mother Nature is also depleting the groundwater because of what we’re doing with greenhouse gases.”
Much of Colorado could be pushed into drought by late summer thanks to hot, dry conditions
Colorado has seen an average water year so far, but looking ahead, climate experts say much of the state could fall into drought conditions and struggle to find relief.
Colorado’s very average snowpack has officially melted away from all 115 federal snow monitoring stations in the state, as of this week. Reservoir levels are at 94%, just slightly below average, while precipitation was at exactly 100% of the 30-year median, according to a Water Conditions Monitoring Committee meeting Tuesday.
