Old water, whiskey adage proves true again

The old adage that "whiskey's for drinking; water's for fighting" has been confirmed again.

Imagine you're a farmer with a crop in the field, fertilized, treated with expensive chemicals and ready to go, lacking only water for it to grow into a product that will help you make your loan payments and stay in business another year.

You have an irrigation well and center-pivot system ready to go, but there's a snag.

Harlan County Reservoir is less than about a third full, making it a water-short year. You farm is within two miles of the Republican River or its main tributaries. Your well will have to remain silent, your corn suddenly a dryland crop.

Since it's already a water short year -- that's a code-word for drought -- chances are, it will wither in the fields.

That's the scenario that could play out under a plan reportedly being contemplated by Gov. Dave Heineman and area Natural Resource Districts, although, depending on whom you ask, the story is either not true or neither being confirmed nor denied.

It's clear that something has to be done. Nebraska dodged a bullet recently with a decision that Nebraska owed Kansas just $10,000 for overusing Republican River water in 2005-06, instead of the $9 million Kansas demanded, but the gun is still loaded.

Kansas had demanded a permanent shut-down of wells providing water to about half of the 1.2 million irrigated acres in Nebraska's portion of the basin. A shut-down only during drought years seems preferable to that, but which would be least disruptive?

Shutting down irrigation wells perhaps a third of the time, the amount of time we can expect a water-short year, or conversion of more land to dryland permanently?

Either would be a devastating blow to the area's economy.

Steve Smith of the WaterClaim.org advocacy group has been addressing the issue on the group's Web site, and is submitting a multi-part letter to the Gazette detailing problems with the computer model being used in the dispute, as well as other issues.

Hanging over the heads of the NRD boards is the prospect that if they don't agree to something like the dry-year shut-down, the state will step in to impose its own restrictions.

It's true that public bodies sometimes need to be able to discuss strategies in private, but at some point, better sooner than later, all the cards need to be on the table for the taxpayers and, in this case, irrigators to review.

Complicating the issue is the successful challenge of a property tax to fund efforts to comply with the Republican River Compact, and a trial over an occupation tax on basin irrigators.

We can't comment on whiskey in Southwest Nebraska, but the fight over water is just about to turn into a brawl.