A massive Nebraska water project has pushed those questions into an increasingly tense dispute with a neighboring state. Both states read the compact differently, and that disagreement is what has pushed the Perkins County Canal project into the national spotlight. Engineers determined that starting the diversion near Ovid gives the canal the best opportunity to collect the volume of water Nebraska needs. The right to those non-irrigation season flows is explicitly conditional on Nebraska actually building the Perkins County Canal. The Perkins County Canal is, in many ways, a defining choice about the kind of water security Nebraska wants to build for the long haul.