Topeka — Some fear the state's new secretary of agriculture may renew efforts to strip away the water-rights power of the chief engineer of the Division of Water Resources.
One of the most controversial issues of the 1999 legislative session will be re-examined this week when an interim committee looks at how water rights are governed in Kansas.
Sen. Dave Corbin, R-Towanda, who chairs the Special Committee on Environment, said the purpose of today's hearing will be to look only at how the Department of Agriculture plans to implement a bill dealing with water governance passed this year.
But others fear the state's new secretary of agriculture, Jamie Clover Adams, may renew efforts to strip away power from the chief engineer in the Division of Water Resources, whose autonomy over water rights has been the source of both criticism and praise.
"We're just going to kind of review how they (the Agriculture Department) are going to enact the law that was passed last year," Corbin said. "Senate Bill 287 didn't go as far as some people wanted to. We're just going to see how they're going to handle it."
Before the bill was passed, all authority to approve or deny applications for new water rights or the transfer of existing water rights rested with the division's chief engineer, David Pope.
Serious consequences
As a classified employee, Pope was protected by the state's civil service laws, and his decisions could be appealed only to a district court -- not to the secretary of agriculture or an administrative hearing officer.
In the original form passed by the Senate, S.B. 287 would have made the chief engineer an unclassified position, meaning he could be fired at will by the secretary or governor, and final authority over water rights would have been given to the secretary, who is appointed by the governor.
The bill created a firestorm of controversy, especially in western Kansas, where water is scarce and decisions about water rights are seen as life-and-death issues for cities, businesses and farmers.
Gov. Bill Graves and then-Secretary of Agriculture Allie Devine argued the bill would bring more accountability to the process. The chief engineer's office was taking too long to process applications, they said, and many were being denied on grounds that seemed inconsistent or unreasonable.
Critics, however, said the old system was designed to insulate water decisions from political influence and that the bill would have removed that independence by placing authority in the hands of the politically-appointed secretary.
Review of programs
The person who spent the most time lobbying in favor of the bill was Jamie Clover Adams, who then was the governor's legislative liaison for agricultural issues, but who now is the state's new secretary of agriculture.
In an interview with the Journal-World, Adams said she intended to conduct fresh reviews of all of the department's programs and activities, including the Division of Water Resources and its chief engineer.
Department spokeswoman Carole Jordan repeated that statement last week.
"There's a chance it could be looked at again," Jordan said. "The secretary has said to all the program managers that we have to look for ways to make our processes and programs work more efficiently."
Lurking in the background of the water-rights debate last session was the issue of corporate hog farming. It was well known that several hog corporations, including Kansas City-based Seaboard Farms, had applied to acquire water rights from neighboring farmers and transfer them to the hog-production facilities.
The original version of S.B. 287 died almost instantly in the House, and the compromise bill that eventually passed was more modest.
Appeal process
It left the chief engineer in charge of water rights, but said his decisions could be appealed through the same administrative hearing process that applies to other regulatory agencies.
It also required the chief engineer to convert all the policies and guidelines used by that office into formal rules and regulations that would go through the same public comment and approval process as other state regulations.
At the same time, it required local groundwater management districts (GMDs) to do the same thing with their local policies.
Mike Dealey, who heads the Equus Beds GMD in south-central Kansas, fears that provision could lead to more large-scale hog farms that could threaten the water supplies of a half million Kansans.
"We view that as a preemption of local management regulations," Dealey said.
According to Dealey, the Equus Beds GMD has policies aimed at protecting both the supply and the quality of underground water that is the only supply for the cities of Hutchinson, Newton and McPherson and is part of the city of Wichita's supply.
Shallow aquifer
The Equus Beds aquifer lies beneath loose, sandy soil, Dealey said, and some of it is less than 10 feet below the surface.
If a medium-scale hog operation (between 1,000 and 10,000 hogs) were to move into the area, he said, current state regulations would allow them to build sewage lagoons that could leak as much as 3,290 gallons of hog waste per day into the aquifer.
Dealey noted that Seaboard Farms currently has plans to build a slaughterhouse near Garden City that could process up to 4 million hogs per year, and he fears that could lead to more medium-sized hog operations in the area, some of which might be located in the Equus Beds area.
If the Equus Beds GMD no longer has authority to adopt its own regulations to protect water quality, he said, large hog operations could poison the water supply that serves one-fifth of the state's population.
"Shortly after we were questioned (by legislators) about our authority to regulate those (hog) facilities, the language showed up in S.B. 287 that required the districts to submit their regulations to the Division of Water Resources for approval," Dealey said.
-- Peter Hancock's phone message number is 832-7144. His e-mail address is phancock@ljworld.com.
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