As climate change and groundwater pumping leave arid western states hurting for water, Missouri lawmakers are considering legislation to keep the state’s water from being shipped outside its borders.
“You may hear about states like California and Kansas in the news having water shortages,” said state Sen. Jason Bean, a Republican from Holcomb. “We don’t want to lose our water because they’ve mismanaged theirs.”
With the Missouri River running through the middle of the state, the Mississippi along its eastern border and the Osage River that feeds the Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri is home to a host of reliable freshwater systems. But Bean and other Missouri lawmakers fear as other states grapple with a drier future, they might look to Missouri as a solution.
“The way the federal government is throwing money around, don’t think it can’t happen,” said Rep. Jamie Burger, a Republican from Benton. “Even if it costs $10 billion to get our water from Missouri to Kansas, to California, to wherever it may be, it can happen.”
Bean and Burger introduced legislation this year that would prohibit exporting water from Missouri unless authorized by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. It’s backed by Missouri agricultural and environmental groups and received support from Republican and Democratic legislators alike.
“I farm in Kansas with my brother and water has become an unbelievable, precious resource,” said Brent Hemphill, a lobbyist for the Missouri Soybean Association, “and I just don’t want Missouri to become Kansas.”
Kansas sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, a formation millions of years old that includes the largest underground store of freshwater in the nation. Since the mid-20th Century, farmers have pumped water from the Ogallala to irrigate crops, bringing parts of western Kansas within a generation of running dry.
Burger said in an interview with The Independent that he wasn’t aware of any efforts to export water from the state aside from some longstanding agreements along the state’s borders with Arkansas and Oklahoma.
“We just don’t want some of the western states that are struggling for water capacities to be able to pipe into our aquifers and pump our water in any direction,” Burger said. “We want to keep that for Missourians.”
Burger said the state couldn’t prohibit someone in a bordering state from pumping water that’s shared between the two — such as Illinois using the Mississippi River.
Despite its abundant water sources, Missouri has been struggling through a prolonged drought — on and off — for more than a year and a half. As of last week, more than 80% of the state was in some level of drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Almost 14% was in a severe drought.
In July, more than one-quarter of the state was in extreme or exceptional drought.
Rep. Paula Brown, the ranking Democrat on the House’s natural resources committee, said she toured Missouri over the summer and saw bodies of water that were “frighteningly low.”
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Categories: Missouri, Crops, Soybeans, Weather