Monday, July 10, 2000
Brazos River counties working
together
Need to find resources,
project water demand creates planning team
By Jerry Daniel Reed
Reporter-News Staff Writer
Members of the Brazos G Regional Water Planning
Group may seem like strange bedfellows, but they’re more
like people paddling the same boat down the Brazos River.
Thirty-seven counties in the upper and lower
Brazos River basin were lumped together in Region G, one of 16
water planning regions created under the terms of Senate Bill
1 passed three years ago by the Texas Legislature.
The law requires regional planning groups
to project water needs, which in large part is tied to population,
and to compare local water demands to water supplies.
Each group must draft a plan detailing its
region’s needs and resources. The 16 regional plans will
form the basis of a statewide blueprint designed to see the state
through its water demands to 2050. The documents are due by Sept.
1 to the Texas Water Development Board, with five-year updates
required thereafter both for the regions and the state.
Region G’s draft plan will be made
public July 28, and citizen comment will be sought at an Aug.
9 public hearing in Abilene. On Aug. 28, the Region G planners
will adopt their official plan.
The plans must project specific water needs
for households, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, power generation
and ecological purposes.
In the Big Country portion of Region G,
Jones, Nolan and Comanche counties are projected to experience
municipal and industrial shortages at some point before 2050.
Cities projected to experience shortages are Sweetwater, Hamlin,
Stamford, Merkel, Baird, Cisco, Comanche, De Leon and Stephenville.
Crop irrigation shortfalls are expected
in Comanche, Eastland, Knox, Shackelford, Stephens and Taylor
County.
Some of these projected shortages are already
being remedied, said Mike Morrison, assistant city manager of
Abilene and member of the Region G planning group. For example,
Abilene and Anson are working with Hamlin on a project in which
Anson will supply its sister Jones County town with water treated
by Abilene, he said.
Grouping counties into planning regions
by river basins made the most sense, said state Rep. David Counts,
a Knox City Democrat and House sponsor of SB1 in 1997. Residents
of the same basin living hundreds of miles apart share many of
the same resources and problems as the river meanders toward the
Gulf of Mexico, he explained.
For instance, salty water that winds up
in Possum Kingdom Lake first surfaces in creeks northwest of Aspermont
and degrades water quality hundreds of miles from the source.
Thus, blocking underground brine from surfacing would solve a
water quality problem for the entire upper basin. Though the 37
counties in the Brazos G region may be in the same figurative
boat, their vessel’s not quite level. The population lists
heavily toward downstream, a tilt sure to only grow with time.
North of Austin, Williamson County, until
recently the nation’s fastest-growing county, is projected
to almost quadruple to about 750,000 over the next five decades.
Four other downstream counties — Bell, Brazos, McLennan and
Johnson — are each expected to easily top 250,000 people
by 2050.
Over the same period, the dozen Big Country
counties in Region G are projected to gain only about 100,000
people to reach a population of 400,000. Of that increase, 60,000
people — or 60 percent — are expected in Taylor County.
Small wonder that community leaders in the
upper Brazos counties fret about being overwhelmed numerically
by the counties downstream.
“We need to make sure that we’re
not left out,’’ warned Knox County Judge David Perdue,
a member of the Region G planning panel.
The West Central Texas Council of Governments
circulated a resolution among Big Country counties that would
press the more populous jurisdictions in Region G to work toward
an equitable distribution of water that creates mutually beneficial
results for all 37 counties. That effort, the resolution reads,
should include maintaining adequate water supplies, enhancing
job opportunities and creating access to resources for future
needs.
“We in rural West Texas have to stick
together to carry more weight with the Legislature,” Jones
County Judge Brad Rowland said.
Tom Mann, economic development director
for the WCTCOG, agreed.
“The reason we need to band together
is because of the dichotomy of the region,” Mann said in
May. “You can’t have growth without water. It’s
more important now than oil in the ground. It’s a finite
asset and the competition for it will be severe.”
One area concern is protecting underground
water rights.
Many of Perdue’s constituents, for
example, would like to keep irrigating their crops from the Seymour
Aquifer, a patchwork of underground water formations dotting much
of the northern Big Country.
In fact, Perdue expects groundwater rights
to surface as a major issue in the 2001 legislative session, now
that entrepreneurs such as T. Boone Pickens are bidding for underground
water rights from farmers and ranchers. Pickens plans to harvest
the water and pipe it to city dwellers hundreds of miles away.
At present, groundwater rights are governed
by the frontier days’ “rule of capture,’’
which empowers anyone owning the rights to water under a given
piece of land to pump out as much as he likes. So, anyone with
the right to draw from a common underground pool could pump it
dry to the disadvantage of neighbors with equal rights to the
water, all without legally violating anyone’s rights.
This same “rule of capture’’
appears to stand in the way of one potential project to better
conserve large volumes of water in this hot, dry region: pumping
it into a large, cool underground natural storage area where the
sun couldn’t evaporate half of it before it could be used.
That potential project to drain water from
Abilene’s Lake Fort Phantom Hill into a nearby Seymour Aquifer
formation in Jones County would not be risked without assurances
that it wouldn’t be pumped out by hundreds of landowners
at will.
Ensuring an adequate water supply in the
future would probably necessitate a choice between an aquifer
storage project and building another reservoir in this area, said
David Bell, general manager of the West Central Texas Municipal
Water District. The water district manages Hubbard Creek Reservoir.
A location north of Albany is the upper
Brazos basin’s only potential future reservoir site identified
in the draft plan.
Legislators will also be challenged to find
a statewide funding mechanism to finance water projects that localities
such as Throckmorton badly need, but can ill afford out of their
own pockets, Morrison predicts.
Contact staff writer Jerry Reed at 676-6769
or reedj@abinews.com. Check
out our Web site at www.waterwoes.com
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