Any attempt by the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources to regulate thousands of new acres in the Central Platte Natural Resources District will be challenged by the CPNRD board of directors.

Board members voted Thursday at a special meeting of the CPNRD board of directors to support the current boundary of the temporary suspension on new well drilling. They also will demand that any future attempt to expand the area where new well drilling is prohibited be based on the newly completed Platte River Cooperative Hydrology Study.

Ron Bishop, CPNRD manager, told the board that DNRs will be proposing rules on designating boundaries for fully appropriated basins.

The state has designated the Central Platte to be fully appropriated when it comes to groundwater use and the district is beginning the process of an integrated management plan.

Bishop said DNR is considering proposed rules and regulations that could further expand the area in which the Central Platte NRD board of directors voted in 2003 to establish a temporary suspension on new well drilling along the Platte River.

The present boundary is an area where wells that have pumped groundwater for 40 years have contributed to a 28 percent or more decline in river flows. That area in the Central Platte NRD now covers about a 6- to 8-mile area along the Platte River throughout the district.

Bishop said if that boundary is expanded to cover an area where wells that have pumped groundwater for 50 years have contributed to a 10 percent decline in river flows, "It would encompass all of our Natural Resources District."

Board members are concerned about the method the DNR would use to expand the area where it will want to regulate new well-drilling activities.

Earlier this year, a five-year, $7 million study of the relationship between groundwater and surface water along the Platte River Basin was completed.

The purpose behind the COHYST study was to give district officials a better handle on future management of groundwater resources instead of the past method.

COHYST will help district officials better regulate water usage when models indicate a pending crisis.

What rankles CPNRD board members is that DNR officials seem to be willing to bypass the more scientifically accurate COHYST and rely on an older method of determining the impact of groundwater usage on surface water flows. CPNRD officials consider the older method less reliable.

At the time CPNRD officials approved the temporary suspension on new well drilling in the district, COHYST was not completed. But at the special meeting Thursday, board members were told that if COHYST was in effect at the time of the temporary suspension in 2003, the area designated would have been a lot smaller.

Currently, the temporary suspension area covers about 40 percent of the CPNRD.

Bishop said the new rules and regulations will be published this year by DNR.

"They have to have it before they can evaluate the other river basins in the state and that evaluation has to be done by the end of the year," he said.

What the new DNR rules and regulations mean for the Central Platte NRD, Bishop said, is that "there will be additional lands that would be affected and impacted that we would have to through a special process of issuing exemptions or special permits in a wider area."

The Nebraska Department of Natural Resources could be announcing its plans as early as next week. Once the plans are announced, there will be a series of public hearings in the impacted areas.

As part of their motion, board members will state their objections to any state plan that doesn't use COHYST and that doesn't adhere to the current temporary new well-drilling boundaries.

Click here to return to story:
http://www.theindependent.com/stories/040805/new_nrd08.shtml

© The Grand Island Independent