Nebraska’s Integrated Management Planning System
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ebraska is well known for its unique natural resources district (NRD) system, in which 23 local agencies handle a wide variety of environmental issues across the state, including groundwater quantity and quality, soil erosion, and flood prevention. While this system gives local bodies significant control, the NRDs also have to coordinate with the state. As awareness of the relationship between surface water and groundwater has increased, the Nebraska Legislature has mandated that NRDs establish Integrated Management Plans (IMPs) to help them coordinate with state agencies. In this interview, carried out early in 2020, Jeff Fassett, the director of the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources (DNR), talks about how his agency coordinates with the NRDs and how Nebraska’s NRD system allows state and local agencies to cooperate in sharing the burdens of interstate and federal obligations. Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Jeff Fassett: I have been the director of the Nebraska DNR since August 2015. Immediately prior to that, I was engaged in private engineering practice with a large national firm called HDR. Before I worked for HDR, I also operated an engineering consulting firm specializing in water-related issues. However, perhaps most relevant to my current work was my time as Wyoming state engineer, a position that I held during two different gubernatorial administrations over a 16-year period. That job was effectively the equivalent of the position I hold in Nebraska today. I was recruited for my current position by Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts at the commencement of his administration. It is interesting that I was recruited, considering that while serving as Wyoming state engineer, I was the representative on the other side of the significant interstate litigation between Nebraska and Wyoming involving the North Platte River, which was ultimately settled and approved by the U.S. Supreme Court. Irrigation Leader: What is the relation between the DNR and the NRDs?
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and the DNR go about developing these plans and clearly establish the roles each of our agencies will play in managing groundwater and surface water. Today, as a result, there is an enormous amount of interaction and coordination between the NRDs and the DNR. Irrigation Leader: Would you expand on how the IMP process works? Jeff Fassett: Most simply, it is a process in which an individual NRD and the DNR develop and outline goals and objectives and create an action plan for the joint management of water. The action items can include activities such as additional metering, the collection of data, the development of surface water and groundwater computer models, and the establishment of controls for both groundwater and surface water. The process also involves the establishment of a local stakeholder or outreach group to provide input. The IMP process can take a year or more, and in the early years it took even longer. The 2004 law required some NRDs to develop an IMP and provided the opportunity for the rest to do so voluntarily. In the years immediately after the law’s enactment, most of the planning work centered on two areas, the Republican River basin and the Upper Platte River basin, in which water use exceeded the available supply. Today, some NRDs are on their fourth- or fifth-generation IMPs. Other areas of the state with more plentiful water resources are just getting started on their very first IMPs, which typically begin with substantial computer modeling and data collection to analyze the interaction between surface water and groundwater supplies. Irrigation Leader: Would you give an example of recent water issues that the DNR and individual NRDs are working on?
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE NEBRASKA DNR.
Jeff Fassett: The NRDs have jurisdiction over the permitting and use of groundwater, while my department has jurisdiction over surface water. For a long time, that didn’t matter much, but beginning about 20 years ago, Nebraska became increasingly aware of the physical interconnection between surface water and groundwater supplies. In 2004, after several years of study and task force engagement, the Nebraska Legislature mandated the conjunctive management of surface water and groundwater resources through a process called Integrated Management Planning. There are statutes that mandate how the NRDs
Stakeholder meetings play a significant role in the DNR’s Integrated Water Planning and basinwide planning processes.
