HAYS, Kansas — This town’s water problem couldn’t be put off any longer.
After an especially dry year, the wells that pumped water to Hays ran dangerously low in early 1992. If the northwest Kansas town did nothing, people feared they could run out of water by late summer.
Most folks agreed it was an emergency. They just couldn’t agree on what to do about it.
When City Hall suggested installing low-flow toilets, people argued that would just clog things up and overload the town’s plumbers. One city commissioner implored the town’s clergy to preach the water conservation gospel from their pulpits. A letter in the Hays Daily News described a plan for strict water rationing as “trying to incite a riot.”
The city stood at a crossroads.
“Hays has an opportunity to become famous,” a local editorial suggested. “Not as the town in Kansas with a water problem, but as that town in Kansas that solved its water problem.”
While communities across the semi-arid High Plains all face their share of droughts, Hays was — and is — the only city in Kansas with more than 15,000 residents but no sustainable source of water.
It’s caught in the middle. Too far west for reliable rainfall and reservoirs. And too far east to tap into the massive — if disappearing — Ogallala aquifer. So when prolonged drought hits, the town’s bucket of backup plans isn’t exactly overflowing.
That’s why Hays continues its decades-long quest for a sustainable water source today — it’s now in the middle of jumping through legal and regulatory hoops to build a 70-mile pipeline that would bring in water from three counties away.
The 1992 crisis wasn’t the first or last time Hays has had to worry about running low on water. But it marked a turning point.
“It was a wake-up call for the city leaders at the time,” current city manager Toby Dougherty said. “They realized quickly the best thing they can do is start conserving what they have.”
Fast forward three decades to a parking lot on the east edge of town.
As the sun creeps toward the horizon, dozens of families mull about at a school district street fair. Some kids line up for a chance to sit in a street sweeper, get a balloon animal or turn an auger dangling from a power company crane.
But in the corner, a big blue local celebrity draws a crowd of his own.
That’s WaterSmart Wally, the mascot of the city’s water conservation program, giving out one high five after another.
