February 27, 2020 at 7:30 AM - Water Committee Meeting

Rationale:  The District has received two new variance applications for expanded acres with an allocation.

Richard Brock
Legal Description: NW 1/4 NW 1/4 S33-T19N-R1W Platte County (SQS#2)
Well Reg #: G-167076
Previous Acres: 141.54
New Acres: 24.70
Three Year Allocation Amount: 3821.58 Acre Inches (27*141.54)
Ranking Score: 461.7

Dayle Alswager
Legal Description: E 1/2 NW 1/4 S8-T18N-R1W Platte County (SQS #2)
Well Reg #: G-042995
Previous Acres: 199.17
New Acres: 49.88
Three Year Allocation Amount: 5377.59 (27*199.17)
Ranking Score: 386.5

Rationale: 

Wells Permits Approved: 1

Landowner	Number of Wells	Number of New Irrigated Acres	Type of Well	County	Subarea
NDOT	1	N/A	Observation	Dodge	North Bend

 

 

 

 

 

 

The total number of approved permits for 2020 is #

Location of Approved Well Permits for 2020:  Correct as of ####

County	Irrigation - New	Irrigation - Replacement	Stock	Commercial	Municipal	Other	Total
Butler	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Colfax	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Dodge	0	0	0	0	0	1	1
Boone	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Madison	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Platte	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Saunders	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Total	0	0	0	0	0	1	1

 

Rationale:  City of Lincoln Well Permit - for a well that was decommissioned because of the flood.  The permit says replacement, but might need to treat it as a new well. 

Committee would like to see documentation that a model has been ran recently as this is a Class 4 well permit.

Rationale:  Gravity to Pivot Conversion in 2015? The hearing was held in 2015 with acres being certified in 2014.  Meters and Allocations started in 2016. 

Staff will investigate further to verify.   

Rationale:  Technical meeting was held on March 2 and Managers meeting on March 4.  

Staff submitted the District's V-IMP report for review at these meetings.   At the technical meeting the choice was evaluation of the allotments for 2021 utilizing current data with the Missouri-Trib model or waiting on adding the AEM flights to the model and extending out another 3 - 5 years keeping the current allotment issued in 2016.  No unanimous decision came from the technical committee and managers on what direction the group will decide to pursue..  At this time the LPNNRD has 1379.3 allowable acre feet remaining.  This allotment is divided 50/50 for surface and groundwater projects.     

Rationale:  Report is due March 1

Rationale:  Nat Oehlrich is wanting to add a pivot to a gravity irrigated field.  The pivot will potential increase his acres.

Committee proposed to Mr. Oehlrich the option expanding with an allocation and submitting a variance to allow the additional acres.  

Rationale:  Staff and Committee discussed the comments from nitrogen certification class held in Schuyler.  The meeting was held on February 26 with Dan Snow, Maratha Roades, Cover Crop Panel and Breakout Session.

Attendees at the class gave good comments and ideas in the breakout sessions.  The data presented by Dan Snow was preliminary but did show livestock waste applications could be a contributing source of nitrate contamination. 

More discussion will be held at the next Water Committee when staff will have the producers comments and answers organized.   

Rationale: 

# new wells has been reviewed and approved for decommissioning since the last Committee meeting.

 

Rationale: 

# wells have been plugged, reviewed, and ready for cost share payment approval this month.

Well Owner	Type of Well	Cost Share Estimate	County

 

Rationale:  Katie Cameron updated the Committee on the ENWRA budget and long-range plans.  She discussed the need to extend the Geo-Cloud agreement to coincide with ENWRA interlocal agreement that expires in 2022.  Katie is always available to evaluate the geological formation for well permitting.  Staff has asked Katie numerous times to interpret the AEM information.  

Rationale:  Copied from an email from Paul Zillig.  

Please find attached the final LPR Drought Contingency Plan Financial Report.  You’ll  notice we came in under budget with some funds remaining in the BOR, WSF, and the Consortium member accounts. 

The BOR remaining funds ($9,512) cannot be utilized for this and have been turned back to BOR.

The remaining WSF funds ($10,768.31) can be utilized for the planned "table top" exercise, I’m working on what we need to do to get that approved.

The remaining Consortium Member funds ($3,104.47) we could use for a portion of the table top exercise cost. 

The table top exercise that we all expressed interest in doing, is now estimated to cost $30,000.  Jennifer has worked with John Engel to put together a good exercise and figure out a way to pay for it.  NeDNR has agreed to contribute $10k, a total of $10,768.31 of WSF funding  can hopefully be utilized, if we use the remaining $3,104.47 of Consortium funding, that would leave us to come up with an additional $6,200 or $1,240 each ($6,200 divided by 5 as NeDNR is already putting in $10k).  Let me know your thoughts?  I don’t see us having a meeting between now and the time the LPSNRD Board would need to approve a contract with HDR (in mid April) so let me know if you think your group is ok with this and you wish for us to proceed with the table top exercise?
 

Rationale:  Phoenix Web Group is offering a service plan. 

Staff recommended to the Committee to start with the silver plan and re-evaluate in a year if this is sufficient.  

Rationale:  No discussion at Committee meeting.
 

• Is Status Quo good water management?
• Are Water Flow Meters and/or Allocations the right management tool?
• Is collecting good and accurate data a justification for flow meters?
• Is Water Flow Meters just the cost of doing business?
• Do we need grant money to proceed?
• Starting and Ending Date?

Total potential cost with producer cost-share is around 4 million dollars without check valves. 

Rationale:  Lonnie Nunnenkamp from Seametrics gave an update to the Committee on the Seametrics - Magmeter AG2000 that is on the LPN approved flow meter list..