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Minutes for SB270 - Committee on Agriculture
Short Title
Allowing water rights that were certified after 2009 to be placed in multi-year flex accounts.
Minutes Content for Wed, Mar 11, 2020
Chair Highland opened the hearing on SB270 at 3:30pm.
Kyle Hamilton, Assistant Revisor, Office of The Revisor of Statutes, provided an overview of SB270 and the statutes that it affects. (Attachment 1) There is a Fiscal Note for SB270.
PROPONENTS:
Kenneth Titus, Chief Legal Counsel, Kansas Department of Agriculture, appeared before the Committee in support of SB270. (Attachment 2) The multi-year flex account (MYFA) established by K.S.A. 82a-736 allows a water user to operate their water right over a five-year period with an allocation based on past average use or the net irrigation requirement (NIR). The NIR for each county is a number calculated by the USDA that is roughly the average amount of water needed under average climatic conditions to grow corn and is adopted by K.A.R. 5-5-12. MYFAs allow a water user to overpump in a season without a penalty, so long as they stay within the total five-year allocation. It also allows a water user to roll forward any unused annual quantity into a subsequent MYFA, which reduces the pressure to use more water than is necessary in any given year because the water right owner will realize the benefit in the future.
Written testimony in support of SB270 was received from:
- Josh Roe, Kansas Corn Growers Association (Attachment 3)
- Kent Askren, Kansas Farm Bureau (Attachment 4)
There were no opponents or neutrals of SB270.
The hearing on SB270 was closed at 3:44pm.
