Implementing the Endangered Species Act on the Platte Basin Water Commons

22: Regime of the River: Nebraska Confronts Its History

265 The regime of the river Nebraska was in the process of defending vis-à-vis Colorado and Wyoming was falling apart within its own borders. In mid-1997, when Nebraska authorities signed the Cooperative Agreement (CA) and thereby promised to prevent or offset post-1997 depletions, they had no legal basis to prevent new groundwater exploitation or expansion of irrigated acreage. In many places the groundwater commons was unsustainably exploited, and solutions could not be found in a continued self-seeking pursuit of satisfaction of individual preferences in marketplaces. There would have to be large-scale collective action . The historical abundance of the groundwater resource, combined with the overwhelming political dominance of groundwater well users and the industries that constituted their supply chain, meant there were deficiencies in Nebraska law and water administration in matters involving surface-groundwater interdependence . The arrival of the endangered species agenda on the socio-political horizon in the late 1980s and 1990s would force two difficult conversations, one internal to the state’s water administration and the other about external relationships with the federal government and two upstream states. With each passing month, new groundwater wells were being installed. They would entrain years of new depletions and, along with older wells, contribute to the escalating water debt owed to the river. Even if all wells were shut off forever on a given day, the depletions imposed would hit the river with varying lag times for years to come. Those debts to the Nebraska Platte system were considerable and would require rapidly increasing amounts of scarce offset water to repay the bill. The question was, to whom was the bill owed? First and C h a p t e r 2 2 Regime of the River Nebraska Confronts Its history r egIm e of t h e r Iv er : N eb r a sk a CoN fr oN t s It s h Ist or y 266 foremost, to increasingly restive surface water users who historically had been first on the river and whose canals were being deprived. Second, to the needs of habitat restoration, as defined by the federal regulatory process in the service of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). During the years 2001–2006, hard-pressed Nebraska water leaders at all levels tried to confront not only Wyoming and Colorado at their borders but also their own history, cursed by a great groundwater abundance that had induced them to neglect internal regime-of-the-river problems. Fixing things required time, of which there was too little. Nebraska water authorities were heavily invested in their lawsuit against Wyoming (1986–2001; see Chapter 11), which was all about the regime of the river at that border. Securing the Supreme Court settlement with Wyoming would release energy that could be applied to Nebraska’s internal and external agendas, but there would be only a few years to install a revised Nebraska order of things to resolve highly charged issues that had been dodged for decades. GRoundwateR Boom By the end of 2005, the state of Nebraska had registered more than 91,000 largecapacity groundwater wells (Table 22.1). On average, that amounted to over 1 well per square mile. Over decades of open access to the groundwater commons , Nebraska irrigators were conducting a massive and uncontrolled experiment regarding the impacts of removing water at alternative points of diversion (not through traditional surface canal headgates) and placing that water in expanded consumptive uses (see Table 22.1). In general, the increasing numbers of groundwater wells reflected dollar savings that came with shifting from more labor-intensive irrigation practices to Table 22.1. Nebraska’s Registered Irrigation Wells, 1966–2005 Year Wells Decadal Net Increase Year Wells Annual Net Increase 1966 27,102 — 1997 78,373 1,072 1976 49,478 22,376 1998 79,395 1,022 1986 71,338 21,860 1999 81,483 2,088 1996 77,301 5,963 2000 82,478 995 2001 83,571 1,093 2002 84,681 1,110 2003 86,223 1,542 2004 88,301 2,078 2005 91,328 3,027 Source: http://www.neo.state.ne.us/statshtml/73a.btml. Accessed November 15, 2006. r eg Im e of t h e r Iv er : N eb r a sk a CoN fr oN t s It s h Ist or y 267 Table 22.2. Net Increases in New Wells and Groundwater Irrigated...