Failure likely in Del Rio's bid for water district organization in 2007

December 24, 2006
By Bill Sontag
Feature Writer

It’s only posturing and sparring now, but proponents of “protection” for your aquatic wealth are edging toward open warfare to protect their own special interests in local aquifers.

Del Rio and Val Verde County are geographic anomalies in the “western water wars” simply because water is so abundant at this crossroads of the Chihuahuan Desert and the Tamaulipan Brushlands. Water is supposed to be scarce in desert scrub, but we are surrounded by it.

Now, a valiant attempt to create a democratically elected protective mechanism – a Val Verde County Groundwater Conservation District (GWCD) – grows in importance, inverse in relation to its likelihood of success. Three factions – ranchers, municipalities, and environmentalists – may be failing in their last-ditch effort to shield the region’s most precious natural resource from the predations of inside greed and outside water markets. Is the GWCD effort stagnant?

Three rivers – the Pecos, Devils, and Rio Grande – converge here, pooling a giant reservoir that, on a hot, summer day, evaporates more water than most small cities need to survive. And the San Felipe Springs just east of town yield a reputed 90 million gallons of clean, truly beautiful water every day. Water is everywhere. It lubricated the city’s late 19th century birth, spawned vineyards and crops, watered vast herds of livestock, fueled railroads, irrigated lawns, and fostered tourism.

Now, water serves as a “carrot” – since a “stick” will accomplish nothing – to attract business and industry, while most Del Rioans take it for granted, fostering a dubious reputation for the worst water conservation efforts in southwest Texas.

With little time left before a state water planning board moves in to take control over water distribution and allocations, a Val Verde County Water Planning Committee strives to pull all competing interests together in search of common ground. Instead, it appears that old differences and pecuniary motives have been revived and given new life. And the efforts, to date, are diverging, rather than coalescing.

“The bottom line on the groundwater conservation district issue is that no one trusts anybody,” said Del Rio City Councilman Mike Wrob. “I keep trying to work from a position of trust, and I can’t get anybody to work that way,” Wrob lamented, Thursday (Dec. 21, 2006). The committee is under the gun to craft legislation to be advanced by Texas Rep. Pete P. Gallego to create a GWCD here.

Since the legislature only meets every two years, Gallego has repeatedly told the committee to get busy. If it fails to get legislative authorization to create the district and the protective conservation measures that go with it, the Texas State Water Development Board may be authorized to set restrictions and allocations for us. And that, Gallego said, could happen before another legislature is seated to consider a third GWCD effort from Val Verde County.

In 2004, Jerry Simpton, president of The Bank & Trust, and others forged a draft bill to create a county GWCD. Local disagreements with it festered and bubbled up in Austin, and the effort failed. On June 21, 2006, a dozen ranchers, attorneys, civic leaders and businessmen convened at Del Rio City Hall, 109 W. Broadway, to try again to agree on legislative language.

Between then and now, Gallego has counseled the group and factions within in it about the importance of compromise and collaboration to avoid a standoff on this important issue. His imprecations notwithstanding, hopes are growing dim for a breach of the current impasse.

If there is any substantive agreement among the three factions, the “landowners” (ranchers) stand apart from officials of the City of Del Rio and from environmental interests representing those who want to preserve springflows for the riparian zones along San Felipe Creek. The city wants to ensure water for a growing business community, and the environmentalists want safeguarded habitat for increasingly rare aquatic organisms, and both are determined to protect the aesthetic values of the creek corridor.

Both of the latter two factions have drafted legislative proposals that are nearly devoid of specific limits or allocations of water from available sources, asserting that an elected GWCD board of directors should, first, conduct scientific investigations to learn the nature of subterranean water – flow, volume, origin, quality, and variability of all those characteristics during plentiful and drought supplies. They call it “good science,” adamant that decisions on allocations are unconscionable without it.

The “landowner” (ranchers) faction has been represented on the committee by Byron Hodge, Justin Burke, T.J. Jarrett, John Weston and “Tuffy” Whitehead. They are leery of any proposal that fails to acknowledge their historic right to use whatever water is pooled directly under their vast holdings of county land. The environmental and municipal factions worry that that “rule of capture,” historic Texas law, could put ranchers in the driver’s seat to sell water to high bidding interests out of the county.

Saturday night (Dec. 23), Jarrett commented, “It’s kind of a difficult situation. I wish the city could have their own district and we could have ours, but we can’t please everybody, and we hope there can be some give-and-take. If they [all other factions] want to register every well, and not grandfather all the wells that now exist, then we’re pretty far apart.”

Wrob, serving as the steady representative of Del Rio City Council on the GWCD committee, queries, “What’s the point of having a groundwater district if you’re never going to have any restrictions in place, and everybody’s allowed to pump all the water they want?” Wrob, Councilman Rudy Chapa and City Attorney David Sorola have represented the city’s interests.

Wrob, Hodge, Weston, Simpton, and Scott McWilliams, project director for The Nature Conservancy, met with Gallego Dec. 15, reaching little accord, but heard suggestions from Gallego to break the deadlock. “The ranchers just want everything spelled out in the legislation now,” Wrob recapped, reiterating his belief that details must be first supported by scientific research.

Jane Morain, GWCD committee member and environmental advocate, is unconvinced that the three factions can find enough common ground to submit a single legislative proposal to Gallego. Morain, her husband Gene Morain, and citizen volunteer Ron Burton have worked diligently to advance the health and appeal of San Felipe Creek. Of the other interests in a proposed district, Morain said, “There’s a little air of paranoia among some of those folks, and that’s why Ron [Burton] has pulled together all the elements that are needed in this bill.”

Gene Morain and Burton met with Gallego Saturday morning (Dec. 16), but also came away with little optimism for reconciliation of factional interests. “It was probably a meeting in which there were no unnecessary words,” Morain said Sunday (Dec. 24).

But, as to any likelihood of accord, Morain exclaimed, “You can’t bring those factions together any more than you can get a bunch of monkeys to play a Beethoven symphony.”