Kansas approves measures to manage water crisis. Advocates, experts say it isn’t enough

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly signed two bipartisan bills Thursday funneling tens of millions of dollars into efforts to protect Kansas’s shrinking water supply and hold officials accountable for further depletion.

For years, Kansas leaders have been aware of a dwindling water supply in western Kansas that will eventually have major ramifications statewide. But the state office created to address the problem has been underfunded for decades as the problem mounted.

One bill increases funding for the state water plan by $35 million, bringing the total for the plan — which is currently critically underfunded — to $43 million annually. The other bill aims to hold groundwater management districts accountable for the depletion and quality of their groundwater supply.

Both bills passed the House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support representing major steps to address the state’s water crisis in the midst of exceptional drought in nearly two-thirds of the state.

“We must protect the water that has powered our booming farming economy for generations,” Kelly, a Democrat, said in a statement. “I’m proud that Republicans and Democrats were able to come together to make progress on this pressing crisis, investing a historic level of resources into major water storage projects.”

Rep. Jim Minnix, a Scott City Republican who chairs the House Water Committee, said in a statement that the policy would improve upon existing funding levels. “This will benefit all Kansans — rural, urban, Republican, Democrats, younger, and older.”

The funding legislation dictates how the money should be spent, with a portion going to a technical assistance fund, which assists small communities in securing applications for improving water infrastructure, and another portion going to a grant fund, which would fund water projects. Any leftover money would be transferred to the state water plan fund.

The other bill requires groundwater management districts to submit an annual report identifying priority areas of concern and create an action plan to address them.

Still, advocates and experts say the bills are a starting point and do not go far enough to solve the problem.

The Kansas Water Office estimates the state needs to allocate $55 million annually to properly address the myriad of hydraulic problems within the state.

Rep. Lindsay Vaughn, an Overland Park Democrat and ranking minority member of the House Committee on Water, said the Legislature has considered bills in the past that would have provided significantly more funding to the state’s water plan, but couldn’t rally the needed support.

“It’s like a dance,” she said. “If you introduce huge water bills like we have in the past, and stakeholders think it’s too big of a change or too drastic, they just shut it down. We learned lessons from those bills, and pulled out pieces to put into 2302 which stakeholders said they would compromise on or they were coalescing around.”

“So this was just a moment where we said, ‘Okay, this is what we can get started on right now,’” she said. “Then we can keep the ball moving forward.”

Zack Pistora, a lobbyist for the Kansas chapter of the Sierra Club, said the measures fell short of the state’s needs.

“We’re talking about 10 years or less for water in some communities,” he said. “We’ve got to make some serious shifts and fast. I’m just not sure that just adding more money is the transformational policy that we need.”

Pistora said the state should ask all water rights owners to reduce their consumption by 20-30% and create more incentives for farmers to conserve water, including asking irrigators, which use 84% of the state’s non-domestic water supply, to pay fees to the state water plan fund congruent with their usage.

But as the situation becomes more urgent Kent Askren, the assistant director of natural resources at the Kansas Farm Bureau, said the legislation is a cause for hope.

“The momentum is there, it’s growing,” he said. “There’s probably more momentum now than I’ve seen in my entire career to address these issues. But now is the time to prove that some of these measures will be implemented with definable and positive results.”