Upper Republican NRD News
6/25/2010: URNRD Issues Penalties For Irrigation Violations
The Upper Republican Natural Resources District (URNRD) has imposed tough penalties on irrigators the District found to be in violation of the URNRD’s rules and regulations. The URNRD board took action at its June 22, 2010 meeting.
“A recent investigation, conducted in cooperation with other Districts, found that in some instances the flowmeters used to measure water use by the District had been bypassed with underground piping, either currently or at some point in time, so that part of the water pumped would not be measured,” said Jasper Fanning, General Manager of the URNRD. “Violators had creatively and deceptively manufactured bypass piping that had the appearance of common surge tanks used on many irrigation wells,” Fanning said.
The owners of the properties responsible for the acts resulting in violations of the District’s rules were sanctioned with the permanent loss of the right to irrigate 1,476.4 acres and a temporary loss of the right to irrigate an additional 779.4 acres for 10 years. The District also imposed sanctions revoking part of the allocation on 960.7 acres for the violations. The sanctions imposed were severe in accordance with the seriousness and extent of the violations. The loss of irrigated value due to the sanctions was estimated to be in excess of $3 million.
“In these times, with all of the interstate water issues and with the stringent allocations imposed on all irrigators, deliberate acts such as these shall have no tolerance,” Fanning said.
The URNRD’s internal processes and checks on water use had caught the discrepancies between reported use and actual use, and the NRD had used other methods to estimate water use based on power records. The primary reasons the violations were not detected sooner were because the URNRD had to excavate to find the underground piping and because of the deceptive design. Other rules violations were also discovered during the investigation, including the failure to comply with conditions of well permits issued by the District.
The Nebraska Groundwater Management and Protection Act allows Natural Resources Districts to impose penalties against those who violate the NRD’s rules and regulations in consideration of the nature and size of the act, financial benefit received as a result of the act, and past acts or violations.
The individuals responsible for the acts resulting in violations of the District’s rules were cooperative with the investigation and took full responsibility for violations on properties no longer owned or operated by them and not all of the individuals’ properties had violations. The violations have been limited to the Upper Republican Natural Resources District, where restrictive allocations of groundwater have been in place since 1978, and to the individuals sanctioned.
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