A three-year moratorium on drilling new irrigation wells in the Upper Niobrara White Natural Resource District has been widened by the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources.

The order says the district’s interconnected ground and surface water is “fully appropriated.”

The order prohibits granting new surface water rights, drilling new irrigation wells or adding to the number of acres irrigated by existing wells or surface water rights.

“This supercedes our moratorium, and it’s more stringent. We still allowed additional acres,” said NRD executive director Lyndon Vogt.

The measure only affects irrigation wells; wells for domestic use that pump less than 50 gallons per minute are not affected, Vogt added.

The order will affect only a few people who recently installed irrigation wells but had not begun using them, Vogt said. The NRD also has authority to grant variances.

Years of steady declines in water levels led the NRD board to impose the well moratorium in March, 2003. The three-year hiatus in granting well permits was designed to allow DNR and UNWNRD to prepare an integrated management plan for both surface water, which is regulated by DNR, and ground water, which comes under the NRD’s authority.

Continuing drought in western Nebraska has given rise to conflicts between surface water users and the irrigators whose ground water pumping they say reduces flow in rivers and streams.

A bill passed this year, LB962, attempts to resolve some of those conflicts by better integrating ground and surface water management. A state appointed water task force helped draw up the measure.

In making the finding that the NRD is “fully appropriated,” the Department of Natural Resources is supporting the effort to integrate water management, said Vogt. “We started our plan under the old law and two-thirds of the way through a new law came into effect. They are trying to mesh the old law into the new one as simply as possible. They are allowing us not to have to start over with our management plan,” he said.

Halting the granting of new surface water rights isn’t a big step, because so few new water rights have been filed in the district in recent years, according to Vogt. And, aside from a spike of well permits issued because a moratorium was imminent, the district hasn’t seen extensive development of new wells in the past decade, he added. “If you consider we have 4.5 million acres, and we see 90 new wells go in overall (in 2003), that’s not a huge increase,” he said. “Prior to that, we were seeing maybe a dozen new wells a year go in.”

But the larger issue of declining water levels must be addressed, Vogt said.

“If you look back over 30 years, since the advent of pivot irrigation, the decline has averaged about a foot a year and with the drought the last two or three years it’s two to three feet in some places,” he said. “It’s something not only irrigators need to be concerned about. Communities need to be concerned as well.”

Work on the NRD’s integrated water management plan is progressing well, and the work will tentatively be completed by spring, 2005, according to Vogt. Putting the plan into effect could take a year or more after that, he said.

Area residents are generally supportive of efforts to manage the region’s water resources, Vogt said. “People realize that water is an important issue and we need to conserve it” while still allowing for economic development, he said.