It appears that the Iowa legislature really really wants to maintain Iowa's first place position on the Most Biologically Damaged State list.
January  24, 10:37 AM Iowa Chapter Facebook post:

"The Sierra Club is disappointed with the water quality bill. By using the tax on metered water, the polluters are avoiding paying for the clean-up of Iowa’s waters. The bill does not allocate enough money to support the water quality improvements needed in Iowa. There is no accountability required to ensure that the projects funded are effectively improving water quality. Furthermore it does not require water quality standards for nitrogen and phosphorus in Iowa’s rivers, streams, and lakes."

Jim Bendfeldt: Respecting Ogallala Aquifer

From the Omaha World Herald, Friday, November 24, 2017. The writer is president of the Nebraska Association of Resources Districts.
Nebraska created the Natural Resources District system 45 years ago to assist with monitoring and managing water quantity and water quality. Farmers and state lawmakers alike saw there was a need to protect the ground and surface waters of our state for future generations.
Nebraska is the only state in the nation that has natural resources districts. NRD officials continue to be sought out by other states for advice and leadership in wise water management.
In the last two years, the NRDs have spoken with officials from at least eight other states who are eager to learn how the NRDs continue to succeed in conserving Nebraska’s groundwater, which includes preserving the High Plains Aquifer — commonly known as the Ogallala Aquifer. It is better late than never.
In a report published in June by the U.S. Geological Survey, water levels of the Ogallala Aquifer — which lies under almost all of Nebraska and parts of Wyoming, South Dakota, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas — were looked at and compared to water levels before the development of irrigation. There were two time frames looked at in this report: predevelopment (about 1950) to 2015, and 2013-15.
With information gathered from local, state and federal entities, Virginia L. McGuire, author of the report, generally illustrated how groundwater levels have changed.
The report found that Nebraska had the least amount of water- level declines out of the eight states examined, despite being the most heavily irrigated state in the nation.
For example, Texas averaged declines of 41.1 feet from pre-development to 2015, while Nebraska experienced only 0.9 feet of decline, which is less than 1 percent. During the other period that was looked at, 2013-15, Nebraska’s average water-level change was 0.0 feet.
Nebraska has also seen rises in water levels of over 84 feet in areas, compared with declines of 234 feet in parts of Texas. Overall generalizations about the data can show a daunting outlook as to what is happening to the aquifer, but state-specific information can show a very different scenario, as is the case with Nebraska.
The hard work and management of the NRD system has created better water management throughout the state and has helped slow down and even reverse the effects of irrigation on the aquifer.
Not all states that rely on the aquifer for irrigation and agriculture invest in a variety of canal and water recharge projects like Nebraska does or regulate groundwater to the extent that Nebraska does.
Our state is ahead of its time in giving authority to publicly elected boards to locally govern each river basin, making sure the aquifer isn’t being overpumped or even drained completely, as in some areas of other states.
The NRDs have worked tirelessly to prevent anything like this from happening, and those efforts have paid off, as seen in the data presented in the U.S. Geological Survey report.
The NRD system of Nebraska continues its work to protect the quantity and quality of the Ogallala Aquifer and sustain all water in our great state for future generations.

"The following is a good introduction to a complex issue." Jim Redmond.  

http://siouxcityjournal.com/ap/national/rural-areas-at-risk-as-water-levels-drop-in-massive/article_30fdf230-85d4-5a7a-b03a-1b07fb378db0.html

Rural areas at risk as water levels drop in massive aquifer

ASSOCIATED PRESS Nov 12, 2017 

DENVER — The draining of a massive aquifer that underlies portions of eight states in the central U.S. is drying up streams, causing fish to disappear and threatening the livelihood of farmers who rely on it for their crops.

Water levels in the Ogallala aquifer have been dropping for decades as irrigators pump water faster than rainfall can recharge it.

An analysis of federal data found the Ogallala aquifer shrank twice as fast over the past six years compared with the previous 60, The Denver Post reports.

The drawdown has become so severe that streams are drying at a rate of 6 miles per year and some highly resilient fish are disappearing. In rural areas, farmers and ranchers worry they will no longer have enough water for their livestock and crops as the aquifer is depleted.

The aquifer lost 10.7 million acre-feet of storage between 2013 and 2015, the U.S. Geological Survey said in a June report.

"Now I never know, from one minute to the next, when I turn on a faucet or hydrant, whether there will be water or not," said Lois Scott, 75, who lives west of Cope, Colorado, north of the frequently bone-dry bed of the Arikaree River.

A 40-foot well her grandfather dug by hand in 1914 gave water until recently, she said, lamenting the loss of lawns where children once frolicked and green pastures for cows. Scott's now considering a move to Brush, Colorado, and leaving her family's historic homestead farm.

"This will truly become the Great American Desert," she said.

Also known as the High Plains Aquifer, the Ogallala underlies 175,000 square miles (453,000 square kilometers), including parts of Colorado, Wyoming Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas. That's one of the primary agricultural regions of the U.S., producing $35 billion in crops annually.

Farmers and ranchers have been tapping into the aquifer since the 1930s to boost production and help them get by in times of drought.

However, overpumping has dried up 358 miles of surface rivers and streams across a 200-square-mile area covering eastern Colorado, western Kansas and Nebraska, according to researchers from Colorado State University and Kansas State University.

If farmers keep pumping water at the current pace, another 177 miles of rivers and streams will be lost before 2060, the researchers determined.

"We have almost completely changed the species of fish that can survive in those streams, compared with what was there historically. This is really a catastrophic change," said Kansas State University conservation biologist Keith Gido, one of the authors of a report on the aquifer published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

November 2017

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