By Russ Pankonin, The Imperial Republican Co-Publisher
    When the Legislature passed LB 701 this spring, many people in the Republican Basin breathed a sigh of relief because they believed the tools were now in place to solve compliance issues with the Republican River Compact Settlement with Kansas.
     The new law added a per-acre-fee on irrigators and increased the amount of tax levy that natural resource districts could collect to help with compliance issues. The people in the basin, both irrigators and taxpayers, will help pay the tab and thought their worries about water issues were about to turn around.
     In reality, LB 701 created a false sense of security that burst like a bubble when the state's Department of Natural Resources recently proposed even further cuts in irrigation allocations-cuts that would economically devastate the whole basin. And all of this came after monumental efforts to get LB 701 passed, which was supposed to help the problem.
     This isn't the first time the DNR has rattled the bushes by proposing unrealistic allocations. Director Ann Bleed and Gov. Dave Heineman came to McCook last fall and dropped a bomb on NRDs with drastic allocation reductions.
     In an effort to ward off those cuts, work began on crafting LB 701 as an answer. Now that LB 701 has been passed and implementation has just begun, DNR has proposed further reductions, once again pitting NRDs against DNR.
     Basin NRDs must remain united on their support of LB 701 and letting it work. Otherwise, DNR's well-used strategy of "divide and conquer" will take its toll again.
     But the entire responsibility doesn't rest with just the NRD boards. Irrigators, business owners, teachers, and for that matter, anyone who lives and works in the Republican Basin, has a responsibility to become informed and involved in the recent developments. Why?-because their livelihoods depend on it.
     Last Friday, the Upper Republican NRD held a special meeting in which they met directly with Bleed and other DNR representatives. Unfortunately, there were only about 20 producers, outside of the board, present. That can't happen in the future, folks!
     The URNRD board has some difficult decisions to make in the next several months over how much irrigation water to allocate for the district, and for how long.
     Unfortunately, the board is having to make some of these decisions without adequate information and decisions by the state. Right now, any proposal is a shot in the dark because DNR must also approve the allocations.
     What's most frustrating for the URNRD is DNR's lack of commitment to protect any additional water the district can put back into the streams through reduced allocations or retirement of acres.
     This water should be earmarked for compact compliance use only. Instead, DNR said downstream surface water irrigators would still have access to use that water, within their own allocations.
     To me, that's just another ploy to put surface water irrigators against groundwater irrigators. Remember that "divide and conquer" theory?
     Even if all groundwater irrigation in the basin was shut down for two years, Nebraska would still not be in compliance with Kansas.
     We must look for other answers than reduced allocations that would cripple this region. As a result, we must stand behind our NRD board and the other NRDs in the basin.
     Despite earlier hopes, the water issues in the Republican Basin are far from over!