![]() “There is a number out there that is sustainable that would meet the needs of both parties,” said Water PACK President Kent Moore. It contends the state is still letting the cities pump away too much water. Led by a group known as Water PACK, that advocates for the water rights of farmers in central Kansas, the R9’s neighbors challenged the state’s order in court. “Hays went over and above when they agreed to these numbers,” Letourneau said.īut even agreeing to the increased reduction wasn’t enough for some of the ranch’s neighbors. Dougherty, the Hays city manager, said if they had been any other kind of business, the state would have applied the formula, they would have accepted it and everybody would have walked away without another word. The two cities eventually agreed to a 30% reduction in their water rights. But the state asked the two cities to leave behind even more to make sure the supply would still be going strong in 50 years.Ī map of proposed locations for water wells on the R9 Ranch. The state’s consumptive use calculation found that the city would need to leave about 15 percent of its water on the ranch. In the R9 Ranch case, that’s the conflict. To make sure that kind of change doesn’t dry up the neighbors, the state limits how much can be pumped away. But when you ship the water away - say, that 70 miles to Hays - none of it will return to the local system. That “consumptive use factor” means that when someone uses water for irrigation, not all of it is used, or consumed, by crops. “What’s really important when we convert irrigation to any other beneficial use, is we apply a consumptive use factor,” Lane Letourneau with the Kansas Division of Water Resources said. In Kansas, transfering water can be as simple as filing an application. “In western Kansas, an irrigated acre is worth two to three times what a dryland acre is.” “Rural communities depend upon the added value of irrigation,” he said. It’s usually legal, if nearly always controversial. It’s the source of lawsuits and deep resentments. He said the movement of water from rural areas to cities has been a longstanding drama in the West. “You purchase the water right, you sever the water right from the land, and you dry that land up.” “This is a problem across the West that we know as ‘buy and dry,’” said Burke Griggs, a water lawyer and law professor at Washburn University. In 2015, the cities moved to change the water use permit tied to the ranch from irrigation to municipal use and get permission to pump the water across the state. What used to be fields of crops, are now patches of native grasses and weeds. ![]() Kansas News Service Irrigation equipment and pumps have all been removed from the R9 Ranch in Edwards County, Kansas. “We don’t have a lot of years left for them to be considered viable.” “We have pushed our existing sources to the max,” Dougherty said. But after several years of drought in the early 2010s, city leaders decided to cash in. “It was the nearly 8,000 acre feet of water rights that came with it.”įor decades, the ranch remained an unused investment in water. “The most important aspect of this property wasn’t the 6,800 acres that was purchased by Hays and Russell,” he said. Standing atop one of the sandy hills on the property, Hays City Manager Toby Dougherty pointed to the fading circle outlines of irrigated crop fields and explained how those fields are now being turned into native prairie. It may yet prove to be just that - if years of fighting with the farming neighbors of the R9 end in a win. The two cities had locked in water rights that would allow them to grow in a relatively parched part of the world. The cities researched their options, including looking into purchasing water from several nearby reservoirs.īut ultimately in 1995, they bought the R9 Ranch in Edwards County about 70 miles south of Hays. “We were just trying to survive from one year to the next,” former Hays mayor and city councilman Eber Phelps said. The near-catastrophe sent city leaders on the hunt for more water. ![]() KINSLEY, Kansas - In the late 1980s, drought left the wells that supply water to the city of Hays and Russell in western Kansas precariously low. ![]()
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