Kansas has a serious water problem, especially in the western part of the state. But more government is unlikely to solve a problem that government policy helped worsen.
The Kansas Geological Survey has documented decades of groundwater declines across the High Plains Aquifer, including the Ogallala region. Long-term drought plays a role, but this is also an incentives problem. The former is beyond the control of agriculture and other water users. The latter is something we can improve so that the water Kansas does have better supports families, farms, and communities.*
Kansas already has an important market foundation. Under Kansas water law, water rights can be acquired, and owners can seek approval to change where or how water is used while protecting senior rights and preventing impairment. Those protections matter.
The question, then, is not whether Kansas has water markets. It is whether those markets can work better.
Kansas should make voluntary transfers, leases, conservation, and changes in use as simple and predictable as possible while protecting existing rights and the aquifer in question. A farmer who conserves water should have strong incentives to capture the value of that conservation rather than lose it.
Prices can then communicate scarcity. When water becomes harder to obtain, its value rises. That encourages conservation, more efficient irrigation, different farming practices, crop changes, and voluntary transfers toward higher-value uses. Government does not need to determine which use is most valuable. People putting their own money at risk can discover that through exchange.
Australia provides a useful, though imperfect, example. Its water markets allow users to trade water entitlements and allocations. That flexibility helps users adjust to changing conditions and demonstrates how transferable rights and prices can help manage scarcity.
Kansas has useful lessons of its own. The Sheridan 6 Local Enhanced Management Area grew out of local efforts to address groundwater depletion and has substantially reduced water use. But a LEMA ultimately imposes mandatory limits under state law. Kansas also offers voluntary Water Conservation Areas, which allow water-right owners to reduce use in exchange for greater flexibility. Both experiences show why local knowledge, clear rights, and flexibility matter.
Privatizing municipal water systems is another question worth considering. Private businesses can fail just as public utility monopolies do, though failed private businesses face market discipline that government monopolies often avoid. The more immediate priority is improving the market mechanisms Kansas already has: strengthen water rights, expand voluntary conservation and exchange, improve measurement, streamline changes in use, and remove unnecessary costs and delays.
Kansas cannot regulate its way to more rainfall or refill the Ogallala with another spending program. More subsidies and bureaucracy may delay hard decisions, but they cannot eliminate scarcity. Nothing is free, including water policies that hide scarcity from users and shift costs to taxpayers.
Kansas does not need to start over. Prior appropriation, transferable water rights, voluntary conservation agreements, and locally developed conservation efforts already provide important building blocks. Policymakers should build on them.
Clear property rights, honest prices, voluntary exchange, local knowledge, and private innovation will not eliminate water scarcity. They will help Kansans manage it far better than another layer of government.
Kansas needs better water markets, not more water bureaucracy.
*This post has been modified for clarity since originally being posted on August 6th.
