Water continues to be a hot topic for Hays City Commission

Although there is a lengthy list of significant projects and issues awaiting action by the Hays City Commission in the coming year, a single issue continues to stand far above any other in terms of importance for our community's future. That issue has been water, is water and will continue to be water.

In accepting the invitation of The Hays Daily News to offer my thoughts for this special Progress edition, I consider it vitally important to let the citizens of Hays know that their commissioners have not forgotten the importance of securing both mid- and long-term supplies of water and that we will not waver in our determination to see this effort through to a successful conclusion.

The story of the struggle for water is a story as old as the arid West. We should not be surprised when efforts to secure our water rights meet with resistance. It's as familiar as the endlessly repeated plot of a Western movie: The cattle baron dams the creek, threatening survival of the settlers downstream, until John Wayne or Randolph Scott or Gary Cooper rallies his neighbors to stand up for their rights.

Leaving aside the over dramatization, that's the situation we're facing today.

After decades of being pushed around, the city of Hays sent a demand letter to Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. In the letter, City Attorney John Bird said that the state must either enforce the water laws or the city would file a lawsuit claiming many millions of dollars in damages.

Recognizing the correctness of our claims, the governor directed her agents to work with us in developing an agreement granting automatic releases from Cedar Bluff Reservoir to the city's wellfield along the Smoky Hill River. This was not charity. It was recognition of the most fundamental tenet of Kansas water law: first in time, first in right. We have the superior right under the law, and the water must be released.

While our right would prevail regardless of potential damage to the reservoir, we knew that a gain for Hays at the detriment of our neighbors would be no gain at all.

Therefore, we worked carefully with the state to design the releases so that they would cause minimal damage to the reservoir. In fact, the scientific data show that the releases required under the agreement would cause an almost imperceptible decrease in the volume of the reservoir, and perhaps even more importantly, an almost imperceptible shrinkage of the shoreline. Further, additional releases would be allowed only after natural recharge of the reservoir had occurred. In other words, the agreement does not permit continued releases during times of drought.

Whether out of fear or some more questionable motive, critics have chosen to ignore the legal and scientific facts, attacking the agreement with misinformation, innuendo and threats of lawsuits or rewritten water laws. The idea of drafting a revised state law to short-circuit the city's water rights would be a dangerous game indeed. Eliminating the fundamental tenet of state water law would produce unimaginable mischief in terms of unintended consequences.

Lawsuits, while at best a stalling tactic, are the right of any citizen. And it may well be that this will end up in the courts if calmer heads do not prevail.

We also face the threat of lawsuits in our Smoky Hill well field. Citizens in that area want to stop the ongoing renovation and better spacing of outdated wells, which would include installation of sophisticated monitoring systems to ensure the health of the stream.

We can understand their desire to have a more pristine river valley, although they have not indicated any desire to stop their own withdrawals of water for domestic and agricultural uses — water that they are entitled to, of course, under the force of the same state laws that they would deny to us.

In point of fact, while not as beautiful as it might be without the Cedar Bluff dam holding back the stream flow and without the withdrawals of water for both agricultural and domestic uses, the Smoky Hill River Valley remains a beautiful spot near Schoenchen, just as the German name of the town would suggest.

We will no longer be bullied by threats. We know our rights. We have acted with great care to forge mid-term water solutions at Cedar Bluff Reservoir and in the Smoky Hill well field that consider the needs of our neighbors as well as ourselves. Being right does not guarantee victory, but if we lose, it will not be for the lack of resolve to see this through to the end.

The prosperity of Hays and the region depends on judicious application of the state laws that control the use of water, that most precious resource in western Kansas.

Kent Steward is a city commissioner in Hays.