Topeka ? Gov. Sam Brownback and members of his administration are moving forward on their plan for the long-term future of the Kansas water supply.

But many parts of the plan, such as dredging state lakes, and possibly building an aqueduct from the Missouri River to western Kansas, will require large amounts of new revenue, as well as cooperation from other states.

During a meeting of the governor’s Council of Economic Advisers last week, Agriculture Secretary Jackie McClaskey asked the group to help form a blue ribbon panel to come up with options for long-term funding of the plan.

“One of the things we have heard across the state is that we really need business leaders to be a part of that task force,” McClaskey said.

Water supplies in Kansas are under stress for reasons that vary from one region to the next. In the semi-arid plains of western Kansas, farm irrigation is depleting the underground Ogallala Aquifer, and in some counties irrigation has been forced to halt entirely.

But in eastern Kansas, which depends more on surface water, the large federal lakes that serve as public water supplies are filling up with sediment from erosion of stream banks that feed into the lakes.

Last month, the administration released the second draft of a document, “A Long-Term Vision for the Future of Water Supply in Kansas,” a project that several departments in the administration have been working on since last year.

The 80-page document is expected to be finalized next month. It contains dozens of recommendations, from water conservation projects to extend the life of the Ogallala Aquifer in western Kansas to development of new crop varieties that require less water and restoration of existing water supply reservoirs in eastern Kansas that are filling up with silt.

The document does not specifically mention one of the more controversial proposals that have been floated: building a 450-mile aqueduct that could transfer water during flood years from the Missouri River in northeast Kansas to storage facilities in the semi-arid regions of western Kansas that currently rely on dwindling groundwater supplies.

But it does call for hosting a summit meeting among governors in Missouri River states, “to collaborate on river and reservoir management issues.”

Brownback said during Wednesday’s meeting that he has already initiated talks among some of those governors. His spokeswoman, Eileen Hawley, said the topic was raised during a recent meeting of the Republican Governors Association.

Kansas currently has a State Water Plan Fund intended to pay for water projects in the state. That fund receives dedicated revenue from various sources, including fees on municipal water bills as well as industrial water fees, fees on fertilizers and pesticides and sand dredging royalties.

But those revenues only add up to about $13 million a year, far less than what would be needed to fund the kind of projects described in the governor’s water plan. In addition, the fund has been frequently tapped for other purposes in recent years when money is short in the state general fund.

The state initiated one of the first dredging projects earlier this year at John Redmond Reservoir in Coffey County, about 80 miles southwest of Lawrence, near Burlington. That project is expected to cost about $20 million.

But officials from the Kansas Biological Survey at Kansas University say many more of the large federal reservoirs in eastern Kansas are filling up with sediment, and the cost of dredging out all of them between now and the end of the century is pegged at around $13.6 billion at today’s prices.