Yeah, the proper response here is:

  NO U

Especially when the entity requesting the valuable resource (water they don't yet have permission to use), is the one prompting for the NDA.

Sorry, private corporation. Take your NDA elsewhere, and go swat at your lowly job applicants with it, as they grovel for permission to waste their youth away in your flourescent dungeons and air conditioned nightmares.

Seriously, people should be protesting out front of the DNR for signing an NDA with Google over a request for public resources.

Imagine if I went to go build a house and demanded the county & city sign NDAs covering all permits and plans for my building. They'd be having none of it, esp. since I'm not a massive company like Google.

This sort of thing happens all the time. You don't hear about it because .. it's under NDA.

Cool way for a gov to hide a piece of info from disclosure to public - just make it a subject of NDA with some corp.