A group of stakeholders Tuesday identified a handful of “high-priority” recommendations for the Arkansas Water Plan that include creating a plan to respond to a drought and maintaining existing infrastructure.
About 200 people from across the state were at the meeting in North Little Rock.
The recommendations will address the state’s water needs and availability, which have been studied as part of an update to the Water Plan, a process that began in 2012. The Water Plan was last updated in 1990 and establishes rules to protect streams, lakes and other water resources around the state.
Tuesday’s recommendations will be considered in the drafting of an executive summary that is expected to be completed by the end of June. After public comment, the summary will be finalized and presented in November to the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission, which is responsible for setting the policy for water rights and water resources planning in the state.
Tuesday’s meeting started with about 200 recommendations from regional meetings around the state, said Kent Thornton, a systems ecologist for FTN Associates LTD of Little Rock, an engineering firm that is assisting with the Water Plan update.
Thornton said that not all of the recommendations could be submitted because they “would run into problems [about] where to begin.” He said some recommendations were also “nested” within broader ones.
Edward Swaim, the head of the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission’s Water Resource Management Division, said there will be several public meetings on the summary report before it is presented to the commission and that none of the recommendations are being “thrown out.”
“What we have to do now is go back through all those recommendations that we had everybody working from” at the beginning of the day, Swaim said.
Swaim said the regional meetings allowed people involved in water management around the state to share their ideas. He said there is largely a consensus on most of the major issues, including conservation, the prevention of pumping groundwater beyond capacity, and a need for better and more data “for just about any purpose.”
“There were no big surprises in what came out, so it was consistent with what everyone who deals with water has been concerned about for generations,” Swaim said.
Swaim said part of the Water Plan’s purpose is educating everyone on how to best use the state’s resources.
“We need to identify who we need to take the message to, what the message should be and some way to go back and test what we’ve done,” Swaim said.
The Water Plan will also provide decision-makers with a timetable for the state’s needs and information, as well as when new infrastructure will be required and when to update existing water-use systems, he said.
Stakeholders also defined regional priorities Tuesday that will be included in the report.
In January, a draft forecast prepared for the Water Plan showed demand for groundwater in eastern Arkansas will outpace supply by between 5.6 billion and 7.2 billion gallons per day by 2050, but said there’s enough surface water in the state’s rivers, streams and lakes to make up the difference.
Groundwater shortages are not expected in other parts of the state.
Last summer, a water-use forecast showed demand would rise 13 percent over the next 40 years, primarily because of increased irrigation, which makes up about 80 percent of the state’s total water use. The forecast also showed a 14 percent increase in demand for water for irrigation by 2050.
The forecasts were prepared by FTN Associates and the Massachusetts-based consulting firm CDM Smith.
Arkansas, Pages 12 on 04/30/2014