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KEARNEY — A budget vote by state senators Friday morning and a stroke of the pen by Gov. Dave Heineman halved funding for natural resources projects in Nebraska.

“It has taken a beating from time to time,” Nebraska Natural Resources Commission Chairman Dick Hadenfeldt, a Lower Loup Natural Resources District director from Dannebrog, said Monday about the Resources Development Fund.

This time the cuts are “gonna be brutal.”

At the joint meeting of the Nebraska State Irrigation Association and Nebraska Water Resources Association meeting in Kearney, Hadenfeldt said, “We’re $18½ million in the hole already and have $30 million in projects waiting.”

So, it would take six to seven years to pay the full amount already committed to multi-year projects, even if no new projects were approved and the development fund continued to get the $3.3 million in annual state funds allocated the past three years.

“So, if any NRD has a project, you’re going to be on a long (waiting) list,” Hadenfeldt said.

Similar budget cuts were made to other programs overseen by the 16-member commission. Also halved were the soil and water conservation program’s original $2.5 million and the interrelated water management program fund that started the fiscal year at $2.4 million.

Hadenfeldt said that if NRDs haven’t already spent all of their soil and water appropriations for this fiscal year, they probably will lose what’s left.

Budget plans call for another 2.5 percent cut in the natural resources programs next fiscal year and 5 percent more the following year.

Hadenfeldt and Steve Gaul, supervisor of the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources Planning and Assistance Division, said Nebraska Water Policy Task Force proposals for a dedicated source of state funds for integrated water management programs never went far legislatively.

“The Water Policy Task Force went over that and over that and over that,” Gaul said, but a solution never was found to make it “palatable.”

One task force idea was to create a State Water Resource Trust Fund by earmarking 1/50th of a cent from each sales tax dollar to raise $4.7 million a year that would be supplemented by money from NRDs and other sources such as federal conservation programs and the Nebraska Environmental Trust.

Hadenfeldt said legislative efforts to increase the development fund to $7 million to $10 million a year never went anywhere. Also a nonstarter, Gaul said, was having a water management priority for Nebraska Environmental Trust funds.

Gaul described resources planning as a “very wide subject” involving numerous local, state and federal agencies that have different resources and priorities at any given time. “You just can’t look at the state budget,” he said, but also at how to leverage funds from other sources.

Gaul said Nebraskans should assess the “total width and breadth of our interrelated water management needs” and then ask: How much funding? For what? By whom? Equity is a big issue, he added, and one that’s often hotly debated.

For the foreseeable future, any such debates will center around less state money.

When asked by the Hub if there is an alternative for the resources development money cut by the budget bill, Sen. Tom Carlson of Holdrege said, “There really isn’t. I don’t look for there to be any general funds for much of anything this next year.”

The situation leaves water resources managers, including the Central Platte Natural Resources District’s Ron Bishop, wondering how to fund new projects or even complete ongoing work such as the Prairie-Silver-Moores Flood Control Project at Grand Island.

CPNRD Director Dick Mercer of Kearney said one option discussed at last week’s Natural Resources Commission meeting was greater use of borrowed money by the NRDs.

Bishop and Carlson see potential for some type of occupation tax, if legislation can be written to avoid the current constitutionality challenge to an LB701-authorized tax used in the Upper, Middle and Lower Republican NRDs. A lawsuit is pending in Lancaster County District Court.

Carlson said the occupation tax idea involves “a group taking responsibility and somehow getting the money to do a project that might help them.”

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lori.potter@kearneyhub.com

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