Water Wars Come To Texas

Recently, we published an article about how the seven states that rely on water from the Colorado River are endlessly squabbling about who should get how much of that water. That article got a ton of comments from our readers, so here is a followup story from Grist about how people in East Texas are pushing back against plans to extract groundwater from their local aquifer and send it to West Texas, where drought-like conditions prevail in many places.

The crux of the issue is that the law in Texas follows a legal principle that traces its roots back to English common law and, before that, to the days of the Romans. It is referred to as the “rule of capture,” and it means landowners have the right to harvest whatever groundwater flows under their property, even if it causes problems for their neighbors. In theory, one landowner with just a few acres of land could drain the entire aquifer and sell the water to the highest bidder.

Kyle Bass is a hedge fund manager who controls two water resource entities — Redtown Ranch Holdings LLC and Pine Bliss LLC. Together, they have proposed a plan that would allow them to withdraw approximately 15 billion gallons of water a year from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer in East Texas. Bass says he does not have buyers for the water lined up, but there are lots of West Texas communities that are building pipelines to bring precious water to them, often from hundreds of miles away.

One of them is San Antonio, which has already built the 140-mile-long Vista Ridge pipeline to the Carrizo-Wilcos aquifer that supplies it with 16 billion gallons of water a year. Withdrawing that much water caused some wells in nearby counties to run dry or produce less, something residents of Jacksonville, Texas, fear could happen to them if the Bass project is approved.

Water Was The Topic At June Meeting

In June, hundreds of local residents attended a meeting of the Neches & Trinity Valleys Groundwater Conservation District to express their opposition to the Bass proposal. Melisa Meador, who identified herself as a wife, mother, Christian, and pecan farmer with 600 acres near Redtown Ranch — one of the LLCs seeking permission to extract groundwater — told the meeting, “Those who endlessly accumulate, sow the seeds of their own destruction. Today’s water barons join river to river, well to well, until all water flows through their meters. Their thirst for profit can never be quenched.”

While her thoughts will resonate with many CleanTechnica readers, it is unexpected to hear them expressed in a community where 80 percent voted for the Republican candidate last year and where free enterprise is a defining characteristic in these communities. “But as they watch water conflicts breaking out all over Texas, they feel their communities are being overwhelmed by heavy industry and profiteering. Some locals have started making the case that it’s not government overreach for the state to step in when the fight’s not fair,” Grist says.

For his part, Kyle Bass said he feels misunderstood. “I’m not coming at this as a robber baron, and I’m not coming at this as someone who intends to do any harm whatsoever,” he told the assembly. “If they come back to me and say, ‘You’re going to do harm, you need to reduce your permit,’ I’m a very reasonable person.” He claimed the amount of water his enterprises propose to extract is less than 1 percent of what the state as a whole needs. “I mean, we’re talking about a large amount of water in this area, but a very small amount of water as it relates to the state. The state has a real problem.”

Texas Water Woes

He is correct about many parts of the state needing more water. Agriculture and industry are expanding faster than local water supplies and aquifers can keep up with. New communities are springing up along the Interstate 35 corridor that runs south from Dallas to I-10 in the southern part of the state. Nobody wants to say the words “climate change,” but many parts of the state are enduring drought-like conditions. Grist describes the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer as “a big, juicy pig, with no one standing guard.”

But there are fortunes waiting to be made in a state where extracting resources from beneath the ground is a major part of the state’s economy. Conservationists, well drillers, and even industry insiders have started comparing the rush on the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer to the oil frenzy of the Texas Permian Basin or the California gold rush.

In 1940, Texas established groundwater conservation districts to monitor groundwater levels and help resolve disputes between landowners. District boundaries often follow county lines, but of course those human-made boundaries have no effect on the water below the surface. If one district says no, people can just go to the district next door until they find one willing to grant the necessary approvals.

After the June meeting, the Neches & Trinity Valleys Groundwater Conservation District decided to bump the matter up to the State Office of Administrative Hearings, which is intended to give citizens, companies, and government entities a legal forum to air their views in high stakes disputes such as this one. But the commission is stocked with members handpicked by the governor, so any decision it makes is often a rubber stamp for what the governor’s office wants to see happen.

The situation in Jacksonville is leading to a growing awareness that every politician in Texas represents one of two kinds of places — districts that need water or districts that stand to lose it. “We cannot compromise one region for another,” State Representative Cecil Bell said at a public hearing at the state capitol recently. At that hearing, several expert witnesses and a few state representatives suggested it might be time to rethink the “rule of capture” and move toward a more modern means of regulation that can balance the needs of neighbors and water systems across the state.

Representative Cody Harris represents most of the area where Bass wants to pump and also happens to chair the Texas House Natural Resources Committee. After the hearing, he filed two bills in the special legislative sessions Texas convened in July and August. One would prohibit water exports from East Texas and another would fund a study of the Carrizo-Wilcox to determine just how vulnerable it is to over-pumping. Both bills failed to progress before the session ended.

Money And Politics

The issue, of course, is money. Hedge fund managers are not paid to consider the public good; they are paid to create profits for their clients. There is a lot of money to be made selling water in Texas — and lots of other places as well — which is a bit of a dilemma for the people in Jacksonville. At the June meeting, Miria Dean told Grist reporter Bekah McNeel the plan submitted by Bass was “greed, pure and simple.” What’s legal and what’s right aren’t always the same, she said.

When asked how to counter the Bass plan, she said, “We still want the government’s hands off. We don’t want their nose in our business. We want them to step in, but only as far as we want them to step.” If that seems like some muddled thinking to you, you’re not alone.

Grist noted wryly that capitalism — the guiding principle of small government advocates — no longer gets a free pass in Texas. “Capitalism is a great thing,” one person told those in attendance at that public meeting in Jacksonville in June, then added, “Unfettered capitalism is bad,” a sentiment the crowd applauded.

If you think any expression of anti-capitalist sentiment in the Lone Star State is unusual, you are correct. But water is a basic human need, and anything that threatens its supply provokes strong reactions, even among those who consider themselves staunch conservatives.

There may be a lesson here for anyone who proposes to limit access to natural resources to a moneyed few. Perhaps if the climate crisis becomes severe enough, more conservatives may find themselves supporting government action to protect the rights of the community. Wearing MAGA hats and watching Faux News is one thing, but when you turn on the faucet and nothing comes out of the spigot?

That’s when people find out being rugged individuals doesn’t count for much when critical shortages of food, clean water, or clean air occur. And if that’s true, there may be hope for humanity yet.