Protecting water resources is still a major priority by Mike Reddell I think most people get it that Texas’ demand on water will grow exponentially, while the state’s water supplies will be predominantly what lies in the rivers and aquifers today. Fortunately for Matagorda County, there have been several people to fight for the Colorado River water in the downstream counties and for the Matagorda bays and estuaries. That fight is challenging enough. The LCRA board was to vote Wednesday on whether to allow Colorado River water releases downstream to the rice farming counties of Colorado, Wharton and Matagorda. Matagorda County rice farmer Haskell Simons warned the commissioners court Monday that the Highland Lakes levels have not recovered from the extended drought months and that would be a deciding factor to the LCRA board. Buchanan and Travis lakes are LCRA’s water storage reservoirs. Simons was at the commissioners court meeting in support of a resolution from Wharton County opposing the exporting of groundwater. Simons is president of the Coastal Plains Groundwater Conservation District and he was accompanied Monday by Leo Hudgins, the district’s general manager. What we’re seeing in Texas is an extraordinary, and to me frightening, pattern of large cities in need of water for growth buying and transporting via pipeline large amounts of water from distant rivers. We only have to drive west of Bay City on Texas 35 to see the City of Corpus Christi’s 40-mile-long, $60 million Mary Rhodes Phase 2 pipeline project. It’s designed to pull 35,000 acre feet of water annually from the Colorado here and transport it to the Texana Pipeline that currently moves water from Lake Texana to the Corpus Christi area. Likewise, San Antonio city council unanimously approved a public-private project last week to build a $3.4 billion, 142-mile pipeline to transport up to 16.3 billion gallons annually from Burleson County (Caldwell) to San Antonio for at least 30 years. Predictably, that plan had lots of opposition, but San Antonio has tried several approaches to get more water, beginning with the See Reddell, Page 8 failed Applewhite Reservoir proposal in the early 1990s. County Judge Nate McDonald noted in an interview Monday that cash-strapped cities sitting on what they believe are ample groundwater levels may be tempted by the money that governments and entities from larger Texas cities would offer for additional water. Simons has long sounded the alarm about removing groundwater from the aquifer beneath Matagorda County as well as river water from the Colorado. It was only a few short years ago that truck farms were appearing here to lease land, drill water wells and take the water to Houston area buyers. My apologies for repeating a column I wrote a few years ago, but I’m from a drier part of Texas, where water has been on the front burner years before many parts of Texas had not awakened to the new realities of water availability. During the Texas droughts of the mid-1990s, I watched angry landowners around Kerrville confront city hall about the deep city wells that were dropping the aquifer levels below the farmers and ranchers wells. Blanco, as you may recall, had to have water trucked in for the dried up Blanco River. As I mentioned earlier, several people are fighting for our water. We all need to be wary about our river and groundwater in Matagorda County - we need it to survive. Just remember that other Texas communities need water and they’ll seemingly will spare no expense to build large pipelines to bring water to their homes.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 19:51:23 +0000
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