Dalia Munenzon
Cooperative Republican Platte Enhancement project involves purchasing retired farms and installing high- capacity wells to pump water from the HPA and pipe it to Medicine Creek. 3 Despite regulations and policies that usually make a distinction between surface water and groundwater, this process causes an absurd situation in which a manufactured process increases the flow between the two – therefore introducing groundwater back into the 'regulatory' commons.
Each of the states across the HPA has different regulations for groundwater and surface water use. Some states view surface water as a public resource and groundwater as private property. There is an understanding between the neighboring state of shared ownership and responsibility over surface water resources. However, when one state is geographically located at the top of a watershed, its water use might dramatically reduce the access for the state at the lower basin of that river. Therefore, agreements are used to ensure the fair use of water between these states. In an ironic twist, agreements are met by seeping HPA groundwater from one state and pumping it into river tributaries in another state. For example, Nebraska's
3 N-CORPE. (n.d.). N-CORPE, the Nebraska Cooperative Republican Platte Enhancement project. N-CORPE. Retrieved December 19, 2022, from https://www.ncorpe.org/
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on site review 42: atlas :: being in place
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