Educating the public about the many issues surrounding water in the region is a top priority for members of the Great Bend Prairie Regional Advisory Committee, The group met Thursday morning at The Front Door for a quarterly meeting and to discuss ways to engage groups of all ages and build support for conservation issues water users in the region will be facing in the years to come.
Kendall Francis, Great Bend City Manager, attended the meeting at the request of Diane Knowles with the Kansas Water Office. Francis is also an applicant to the advisory committee. Confirmation is anticipated in early 2019. Prior to coming to Great Bend, Francis served 19 years as the water treatment operator for the City of Beloit before becoming that city’s utilities director, he said. He also served two terms on the Solomon Basin Advisory Committee, through which he worked closely with the Kansas Water Office and attended Water Authority meetings.
Other city managers at the meeting included Sterling’s Taggart Wall and Pratt’s Roy Ekert. A host of members representing agricultural, conservation and water use interests throughout the region were also in attendance.
The Great Bend Prairie RAC has identified a number of needs in order to achieve the region’s top goals in a locally developed plan. The plan affects cities, industry, and agricultural irrigation. The latter is by far the biggest segment of water use in the area.
At the top of the list is to update the existing groundwater model in the region with current data. This will allow the RAC to quantify sustainability needs across the region. This will ensure ideal outcomes, including possible pumping scenarios that will achieve long term sustainable pumping levels.
Earlier this year, Orrin Feril, Manager of the Big Bend Groundwater Management District No. 5, put together a scope of work that would update an existing sustainability model that covers the entire RAC, not just the GMD. He has collected data over a 10-year period from 2007 through 2017 to make sure calibration is still accurate and calibrated properly for the area, enhance the model to take better account for water quality in the aquifer, and determine sustainability for the area and highlight the areas that will not achieve that, he said.
“It will cost $57,000 to do everything in that scope of work,” he said. Proceeding will provide the area with a better idea of what sustainability looks like for this region, not just the GMD, he said.
Moving ahead with the model will allow for better, proactive goal setting, he said, and that could be done as early as the second quarter of 2019. But, with an election coming up, politics will play a part in what funding may be available. Members opted to table any action until after the Nov. 6 election.
Diane Knowles with the Kansas Water Office presented a Power Point presentation created by the Kansas RAC, explaining how water is used in the state, with comparison of eastern and western water use. That group made it available to other RACs throughout the state to customize to their region, she said.
Members saw the document’s value and were eager to begin developing it for use in raising awareness among a variety of groups including city and county elected officials, various service groups and school and youth organizations.
“We need people to be aware of the seriousness of some of the issues,” Jeff Holste, Burdett, said. “They need to know what we’re doing, what we’re working toward, and these are the steps that will be part of that process. We need support from everybody in the region.”
Feril noted he has been asked to present to many groups, including schools.
“Bar none, when I’m asked to go to a high school or grade school, I get some of the most insightful questions from the kids than any other group period,” he said.
Changing habits often takes a few generations, it was generally noted. The youth of today are going to be the ones to implement changes in the future, and the importance of including them in the dialogue was uniformly acknowledged.
Feril described a recent Stafford County presentation he made, where he explained how the concerns of their parents today will affect them if they decide to come back to the area and start families and businesses here in the future resulted in hard questions from youth.
Keith Miller, a Barton County farmer and member of the Kansas Farm Bureau, made a motion to use and develop the Kansas RAC Power Point, and Feril amended to include development of a secondary presentation geared towards youth. The committee unanimously approved the motion.
