STAFFORD COUNTY, Kansas — A proposal to resolve decadeslong wrangling over water in central Kansas is slated for release this spring. The draft plan falls under a federal program that has under previous administrations traditionally opened doors to significant financial backing for water conservation projects.
Years of talks, policy proposals, local conservation incentives, data crunching and a few lawsuits haven’t solved a conflict that effectively pits rising water use by humans — primarily for crop irrigation — against wildlife conservation at one of the most important wetlands in the country.
Instead, streamflows to Quivira National Wildlife Refuge have worsened over time.
Although Quivira has water rights under Kansas law, in practice, the refuge often stands too dry to support the hundreds of thousands of shorebirds that must find shallow waters in the heart of the continent to survive their long migrations.
Two recent developments may open a new chapter in the saga.
Firstly, water users exceeded an important target to pump less groundwater in 2025 in the watershed that impacts Quivira.
Secondly, local and federal officials are crafting the first watershed plan for the area under a federal program that in past years has covered up to 75% of construction and installation costs for projects that benefit water supplies for agriculture.
The rest of the money would need to come from state and local sources.
The Natural Resources Conservation Service — which is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and is the lead agency working on the proposal — said in an email that federal money depends on congressional appropriations, “so funding is not guaranteed.”
NRCS said the goal of the plan is “to provide for long-term, sustainable agricultural water management.”
The public will get its first peek at the draft this spring, the agency said. A public comment period will follow.
NRCS is working with local water officials on the proposal.
“We want to see this thing resolved,” Orrin Feril, manager of the area’s groundwater district, said in an interview in September, and “to see Quivira get the water that it feels entitled to, that makes it so that Quivira can flourish into the future.”
Big Bend Groundwater Management District 5 spans parts of eight south-central Kansas counties. It represents irrigators and other groundwater users, such as municipal utilities and landowners pumping water for livestock.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Kansas Department of Health and Environment and Kansas Department of Agriculture are also cooperating on the project, NRCS said.
NRCS said the draft evaluates “a wide range of options” for achieving sustainable water use.
Some of those options include analyzing the potential impact of: state-mandated water cuts; buying water rights from irrigators and retiring those rights; paying farmers to cut back on pumping; drilling new wells or repurposing existing ones to pump groundwater directly to Rattlesnake Creek; or having water users create the kind of locally imposed pumping limits that northwest Kansas farmers employ to slow depletion of the Ogallala aquifer.
Not enough water for everyone who wants it
The way water rights work in Kansas, landowners who have held the paperwork longest get precedence.
Quivira has had water rights since the early 1960s that specify how much water the refuge is entitled to from Rattlesnake Creek, the main waterway that feeds into it.
Like other streams in this part of the country, the water in Rattlesnake Creek comes in large part from an underground aquifer spilling into the creek bed.
Over the decades, the state of Kansas also approved hundreds of other water rights in this area that entitle farmers and others to drill wells and use groundwater. (The state no longer grants any new groundwater rights in the area.)
Depleting this underground water means that the aquifer has less to give to Rattlesnake Creek. A state investigation found that since the 1970s, the creek has often run too low to fulfill Quivira’s water rights.
The refuge’s needs take precedence, on paper at least, over the vast majority of other water users in the watershed because of seniority.
Kansas enforces a senior water right, however, only if the owner of that right demands action.
The Fish and Wildlife Service owns the refuge. After decades of trying to resolve the matter through voluntary efforts, it began about a decade ago to ask Kansas to act. It repeatedly filed to have its water rights upheld, but it also eased off each time amid public and political pressure.
Communities near Quivira have begged the federal agency to weigh the potential harm to local incomes if Kansas imposes cuts on groundwater pumping.
The Rattlesnake watershed, nearly 100 miles long, cuts northeast across half a dozen rural counties before reaching the wetlands.
In 2023, more than 30 community leaders cosigned a letter warning against hammering the regional economy, hurting the tax bases of local governments and schools and making it difficult to attract new employers, such as a proposed dairy.
Politicians from both major parties backed their concerns, including Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly and Republican U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran.
The Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to a fresh round of talks in lieu of seeking enforcement of its water rights. That means groundwater officials, government agencies, agriculture groups and conservation groups meet regularly in search of a solution that won’t require Kansas to impose top-down cuts on groundwater pumpers who impact Quivira.
The Fish and Wildlife Service kept its demand for enforcement on file with the state of Kansas in case things don’t work out. This looms over the situation, adding urgency.
But with a new administration in Washington, D.C., critics of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s stance see an opportunity.
This month, Republican U.S. Congressman Ron Estes wrote to the Trump administration, urging it to ratchet down the stakes. He called Fish and Wildlife’s looming pressure “one of the significant barriers” to solving the situation, and asked for a promise that the agency won’t pursue enforcement of Quivira’s water rights at least through the end of 2026.
“Agriculture is the basin’s primary industry,” he wrote. “Any reduction on the farms’ ability to irrigate would be an economic disaster for thousands of hardworking Kansas families.”
A successful start to a five-year plan
Under the Biden administration, the Fish and Wildlife Service had agreed to hold off on pursuing top-down enforcement and instead see whether landowners could find ways to hit annual targets for five years to divert less water from Rattlesnake Creek.
By August 2024, it became clear that they would hit the first target, after enough landowners signed agreements promising to reduce pumping in 2025.
Kelly and Moran celebrated the news.
“The unparalleled progress we have made is encouraging,” Kelly said, adding that work will continue to ensure water for wildlife “while avoiding economic damages to local communities.”
“The work done today will help ensure farming and ranching operations continue for generations to come,” Moran said.
The Nature Conservancy also applauded the development.
“It demonstrates that the collective efforts of local communities, conservation groups, natural resource agencies and private industry drive on-the-ground solutions so that people and nature can thrive together,” said a written statement from Heidi Mehl, the group’s director of water and agriculture programs in Kansas.
A mishmash of programs and incentives made it possible to hit the first-year target. The single biggest factor was a new Central Kansas Water Bank program that offered money to groundwater users if they agreed to ease off their pumps. The program prioritized areas of the Rattlesnake watershed that impact Quivira the most. It sealed dozens of deals to reduce water use for 2025.
But that money wasn’t easy to come by. The state kicked in $4 million and an alliance of state and regional organizations scrambled to raise several hundred thousand more.
It’s unclear how far this approach can stretch. The annual targets require additional reductions to water usage in the area for each of the next four years.
And still, the five-year plan is just a start. If successful, it would prevent the water shortage from continuing to worsen, but it wouldn’t end the shortage.
That’s why people on all sides of the issue want to see a long-term fix, even if they don’t all agree on how to achieve it.
“So that we’re not having to do this every single year … And so that the issue is no longer hanging over this region — and we’re moving forward,” said Feril, from the Groundwater Management District.
Audubon of Kansas, which sued unsuccessfully to protect Quivira, said in a statement last summer: “Quivira needs its water right upheld.”
Past voluntary efforts have consistently failed to resolve the situation, it said.
“Without more water, only a few small pools remain,” it said. “Birds must compete with each other for limited resources. Concentrations of birds in smaller areas also increases the chances of disease transmission.”
North American shorebird populations have shrunk by an estimated one-third over the past 50 years. Many of these species migrate among North America, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. They face a wide variety of risks on their international paths, including pollution, intense hunting and the loss of wetlands and grasslands to agriculture and other development.
In the U.S., they rely on finding wetlands far away from the shores they’re associated with.
Each spring, more of these birds cut north through the middle of the United States than follow the Pacific and Atlantic flyways.
This is why Quivira’s salt marshes, more than 700 miles from the nearest coast, play host to so many shorebirds. Hundreds of thousands of them can stop to refuel at Quivira and nearby Cheyenne Bottoms in a single migration season.
The two sites also support endangered whooping cranes, a species that numbers fewer than 700 wild birds, and hundreds of thousands of ducks, geese, egrets, ibises and other avian travelers.
Cutting back on pumping groundwater in the area would increase the amount of water bubbling into Rattlesnake Creek and Quivira, but not immediately. Groundwater moves slowly, a state investigation concluded, so it could take anywhere from two years to decades to see the results.
Celia Llopis-Jepsen is the environment reporter for the Kansas News Service and host of the environmental podcast Up From Dust. You can follow her on Bluesky or email her at celia (at) kcur (dot) org.
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