Let's hope the public (that's you) finally get off their tails and demand sustainable use of water across the High Plains of Kansas. That will obviously require a broader goal than keeping water in Webster, Cedar Bluff, Norton, and Kirwin for fishing and boating. It will require a more visionary philosophy than city leaders lusting for municipal growth, greener lawns, and nicer golf courses.

What's needed as well is to tell the irrigation-feedlot-corn growers lobby they're full of it when they claim - as Rep. Dan Johnson, R-Hays (KS) did recently - that, "Water rights are real property rights. [so] If water is taken and senior water rights are impaired, the water right owner must be compensated for the taking."

The state has dilly-dallied for decades on groundwater declines and vanishing streams, seeps and springs. One big reason is the cuckoo fiction, endlessly repeated, that if appropriation permits are regulated to reduce pumping, taxpayers owe irrigators money for a "taking" as set out by the U.S. Constitution's 5th Amendment. Even if Johnson were wholly correct (and he isn't) there's not enough money in the public till to pay for enough water rights to solve any significant part of the problem.

But there's no reason, legal or moral, to pay irrigators, who use 95 percent of the groundwater in western Kansas, for pumping less. Many if not most have benefited for years with water over-allocated by foolish (to put it mildly) state regulators. Good grief, if anyone has been harmed by a taking, it is those of us and our descendants who hope to live here in the future, using water more sustainably for different purposes than growing water-intensive crops.

Johnson and others in his camp like to cite Kansas law 82a-701(g), which truly says that an appropriation right "is a real property right" and may be sold, transferred, leased, given away, or inherited. However, and a big however, comes by way of 82a-707(a) which declares that an appropriation right "shall not constitute ownership of such water."

At a water meeting in Wakeeney, Kansas, I asked Johnson he thought that meant. "I don't know," he said. Well, it seems fairly straightforward to me: Yes, Rep. Johnson, water is property, but not private property. If anyone is owed anything, irrigators who've enjoyed using over-appropriated water for years owe the rest of us who live here.

The law (82a-702) also says that Kansas water is "subject to the control and regulation of the state." The state, through the Division of Water Resources, has the right and responsibility to regulate water in the broader public interest.

Johnson and others raise the provision of "first in time, first in right" which applies to disputes between competing individuals or entities. A water user who acquired his right (actually, a regulatable permit) before his neighbor''s has a "senior" permit and has preference (is first in time) over the neighbor's "junior" permit. All that said, however, the broader public interest in stewardship clearly should trump water squabbles between private litigants.

One way to limit pumping is the intensive groundwater use area, or IGUCA. The law (82a-1036) lists triggers for declaring for IGUCA's. An important one is where "groundwater levels.are declining or have declined excessively" or where "the rate of withdrawal equals or exceeds the rate of recharge." That's the precise situation in many areas of western Kansas.

(Groundwater Management Districts--who are de facto irrigation lobbies--argued in the past that the law stopped the Chief Engineer from interfering inside GMDs. However, a KS State Attorney General's Opinion 2002-24 in May 2002, found otherwise: "the Legislature did not intend that a GMD be able to preclude or prevent the Chief Engineer from establishing an IGUCA within a GMD.")

So what is the public interest? Kansas Administration 5-3-9 (b) tells us: "Unless otherwise provided by regulation, it shall be considered in the public interest that only the safe yield of any source of water supply, including hydrologically connected sources of water supply, shall be appropriated." Administrative regulations have the force and effect of law.

Bottom line: You've been told. If you're not raising some kind of constructive hell about water declines, you should be.

(This column was first published in the HDN)