Project to augment Republican River water upsets some neighbors

A project that sends water to Kansas to keep Nebraska out of legal trouble is running into complaints from some neighbors, upset about tumbleweeds -- and taxes.

On a blustery morning in western Nebraska, an early snow has turned the farm road ahead into a white stripe between brown fields. But something’s fuzzing up the edges of this picture. On either side of the road, armfuls of tumbleweeds are caught up in the bordering fences. In some places, they spill across the entire road.

For city folk, this vegetation may conjure up romantic images of the old West. But to rancher Lynn Frederick, those tumbleweeds on his cousin’s farm look like trouble down the road.

“They plug into the fences and the snow comes along and just weights the wires down, breaks the wires and pulls the staples out. You’ll have splices and splices don’t make a nice fence,” Frederick said.

Frederick blames the tumbleweeds on poor land management by one of his neighbors: N-CORPE. That’s shorthand for the “Nebraska Cooperative Republican Platte Enhancement Project,” a government body created by four natural resources districts.

Five years ago, N-CORPE bought more than 15,000 acres of land south of North Platte in Lincoln County. Water underneath that land used to irrigate crops on the surface. Now, that water is pumped away to the Republican River, to make sure Nebraska sends enough water downstream to Kansas.

N-CORPE is trying to reseed the land where corn, beans and potatoes use to grow so cattle can graze there. N-CORPE General Manager Kyle Shepherd acknowledges it hasn’t been easy.

“It’s been a struggle. We’ve got probably 75 percent of our fields that are a success, probably another 20 percent are kinda borderline – just wait and see; 5 percent are probably a failure,” Shepherd says.

Shepherd says he doesn’t doubt some tumbleweeds are coming from thistles growing on land N-CORPE hasn’t successfully reseeded. But he says they’re coming from other landowners’ property, too.

“I don’t think the tumbleweed problem this year is unique to N-CORPE. I think it’s fairly widespread,” he said with a laugh.

Tumbleweeds aren’t the only gripe some neighbors have with N-CORPE. Another is property taxes. In 2013, when N-CORPE’s land was still irrigated and used to grow crops, $488,000 of taxes were paid on that property. Two years later, after N-CORPE stopped irrigating, Lincoln County Assessor Julie Stenger reassessed the property as grassland, cutting N-CORPE’s bill by two-thirds but keeping the property on the tax rolls.

Stenger says state law allows her to tax government-owned property if it’s not being put to a public use.

“The water project is definitely the public use. The land is not being used for any public purpose whatsoever. And those can definitely be separated,” Stenger said.

N-CORPE Attorney Don Blankenau disagrees.

“It’s a nice theory but there’s no support in the law for it. What you’re taxing through a property tax is that surface land. And the question then becomes ‘What is the dominant or overriding use of that land?’ And in this case the dominant or primary purpose for the acquisition of that land was to access the underlying groundwater,” Blankenau said.

N-CORPE’s been winning the argument so far, and Lincoln County has taken the issue to court. If it loses, the biggest loser could be the school district in rural Wallace, Nebraska, which serves about 200 students. Superintendent Tom Sandberg says Wallace would have to repay N-CORPE about $50,000 a year – a big deal to a district like Wallace.

“In the small schools, we’ve got one history teacher. We’ve got one science teacher. We have one librarian. We have one, you know? And if we cut back, then we may not meet the Rule 10 requirement from the state to be an accredited school,” Sandberg said.

Rule 10 contains the state’s minimum staffing requirements for public schools.

Asked about N-CORPE’s effect on Wallace, Blankenau puts it in a larger context.

“I can’t really comment on their finances. I can just say N-CORPE I think has consistently indicated it is concerned about the impact to Lincoln County,” he said.

But he says Lincoln County, and all the surrounding counties, would be worse off without N-CORPE.

“You would have many more irrigated acres put out of production without this project,” Blankenau said.

The last time Nebraska used too much Republican River Water, Kansas sued, asking for 300,000 irrigated acres to be idled, and Nebraska to pay $80 million. The state eventually paid $5.5 million, and avoided idling hundreds of thousand of acres. But Blankenau says without projects like N-CORPE, Nebraska would probably be at risk for such a lawsuit again.

Lincoln County Appraiser Henry Vogt says the county’s bearing an unfair share of the cost of solving a problem for the state.

"It’s a Nebraska-Kansas-Colorado pact, not a Colorado-Kansas-Lincoln County pact," Vogt said, referring the Republican River Compact.

Blankenau says N-CORPE is willing to make payments in place of taxes if the Legislature will authorize it. N-CORPE is funded through payments from irrigators across the four NRDs. And Blankenau says projects like this are needed.

“The big picture is that the state made certain deals many years ago for the most part that it didn’t fully appreciate the consequences until fairly late in the game, and now we’re playing catch up,” he said.

Those deals govern the Republican River, fed by water from N-CORPE’s land. But they also include the Platte, where N-CORPE just finished a pipeline, and could start pumping water in the next few years, as the state continues to try and move water where it’s needed.

Video excerpt from a co-production of NET Connects for Nebraska Association of Resources Districts