The dire state of water in western Kansas is not in dispute. The aquifer Kansans out west rely on to irrigate crops and provide drinking water dropped by a foot in 2021.
“If you look at charts as to where it was … when they started irrigating and now, it’s alarming,” said the House Water Committee chairman, Rep. Ron Highland, R-Wamego.
The Ogallala Aquifer has just 10 years left in one county in the extreme western part of the state, where groundwater supplies towns and irrigates crops in an otherwise arid countryside.
How to handle the drying out of the huge swaths of Kansas’ farmland is a point of serious contention. Tension between the rights of farmers and the reality that water is running out stalled a massive effort this session to get a handle on the state’s most precious resource.
After a year of study and legislators’ visit to Garden City, where the Arkansas River bed sits dry, it appeared that the Kansas House Water Committee was ready to raise water issues to a cabinet-level position, grant more independence to the state’s chief engineer and demand more oversight of local agencies charged for decades with stopping depletion of the aquifers.
But a bill meant to do all that died without ever seeing a debate on the House floor. Committee members voted to essentially gut the bill with an amendment backed by agricultural groups. A bill meant to demand more oversight over the aquifer died without ever seeing a debate on the House floor. Committee members voted to essentially gut the bill with an amendment backed by agricultural groups.
“My fear is that, ultimately, they have so much power that they don’t have to come to the table if they don’t want to, and that’s going to be to the demise of our rural communities in western Kansas,” said Rep. Lindsay Vaughn, D-Overland Park, the committee’s ranking Democrat.
Highland won’t seek reelection and will leave office in January without seeing his efforts culminate in any legislation passed. But to him, not all is lost. 
House members and senators will keep studying declining water in western Kansas and quality issues in the east before they introduce legislation for the next session, with far more time for stakeholders to take a look before hearings and negotiations begin. Meanwhile, state auditors will take a look at groundwater management districts in southern and western Kansas that have been charged since the 1970s with overseeing water conservation with mixed success.
“We want to know how much conservation they’ve actually done…and we want to know where the money goes,” Highland said.
Rights and responsibilities
For more than 75 years, the right to use water in Kansas has been governed by a simple idea: “first in time, first in right.”
Farmers who irrigate crops hold water rights, which are considered property rights. Those who have held them longer have seniority over newer water right holders, and they’re entitled to a certain number of
acre-feet of water.
Farmers and ranchers — and, as a result, the Kansas Livestock Association — take that right seriously.
