What price, water?

July 3, 2006

By Bill Sontag
Feature Writer

If water isn’t the next oil, why would T. Boone Pickens and the Bass Brothers be buying up water rights all over the state?

-- John Ludlum, Benny’s Café, June 23rd

WATER BROKER. WATER HARVESTER. WATER MARKETER. WATER ...

No matter which term is on the lips of mid-morning coffee drinkers at Benny’s Café in downtown Del Rio, the bittersweet taste of both the coffee and the enterprise are all the same. The coffee is not mysterious, but the enterprise is a mix of landowners, drillers, pipeliners, and brokers who may want to pump water out of Val Verde County’s rich aquifer, and sell it to city dwellers 150 miles away. And considering what they’ll reap at the other end of the pipe, the marketers are willing to pay good money to suck it out of our ground.

“Water marketer” is the term that’s settled into the lexicon of small town natives who grew up with the odd abundance of clean water below, hardscrabble desert above, and an often thin barrier of 150 million-year-old limestone in between. Little Texas communities – such as Del Rio – struggling to keep a loosening grip on agricultural traditions, know the water marketers are watching … and waiting.

The term – water marketer – might draw quizzical looks in restaurants and other species of watering holes in San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas where growth and sprawl have outstripped the cities’ abilities to quench their own thirst. Yet, soon, burgeoning populations in stretching suburbs, high rise financial palaces, and lusty manufacturing centers may depend on imported water, regardless of the titles or the reputations of the men or women that bring it to them. It’s fair to assume that water marketers – a growing legion – are keenly aware of the value of what could be mined from the subterranean karst of Val Verde and surrounding counties. This is not a caveat emptor scenario. It’s not the buyers – such as San Antonio suburbanites – who must be aware, it’s the sellers.

In today’s Texas, moves are afoot to keep a closer eye on the sellers than on the buyers. Scrutiny is heating up on landowners who propose to sell to the water marketers, and on the marketers who want to sell Val Verde County water to Laredo or San Antonio. The “chain of custody” of Val Verde water is not as linear as it may seem. Enter the attorneys, financiers, legislators, politicians, and environmental activists, and the stew thickens.

Like the center pivot on a cropland irrigation system, Texas water law – dubbed “the rule of capture” – controls nearly all extraction from aquifers in counties not already governed by a Groundwater Conservation District (GWCD). According to “the rule,” if you own land, and punch a hole through the earth’s crust to get at it, it’s indisputably yours to do with as you wish. You may drink it, water your herds, irrigate crops, fill a swimming pool, or sell it to the highest bidder. That latitude can be a problem for anyone who may be affected by the loss of critically important water from local supply sources. And considering the independent way water moves – naturally slowing and spreading out after rushing through confinement, falling to lower elevations from high points, freezing, thawing, vaporizing, condensing – someone is certain to be affected, perhaps dramatically, when those movements are redirected, and sent out of the county.

Benny’s Café Coffee Club regular Lt. Col. Jim Hester knows well the worth of water. After his retirement from the Air Force, Hester served as Del Rio’s city manager, 1969 – 1978. A few years ago, he retired again as secretary of the Val Verde Community Foundation, a philanthropic organization set up to own and subsidize the San Felipe Agricultural, Manufacturing and Irrigation District, distributing profits from water sales to local non-profit organizations. Hester said caution is advised in considering Del Rio’s apparent water wealth. The city’s legendary and historic irrigation system, branching off of San Felipe Creek, in turn fed by the city’s amazingly prolific San Felipe Springs, has run freely through south Del Rio, sending water to hayfields, pastures, crops and residences for 136 years.

Hester simplified the water issue succinctly: “Well, if you sell too much, you don’t have anything to irrigate with. We don’t have an unlimited supply of water here.”

Jerry Simpton, president, The Bank & Trust, Del Rio, said the complex issues, emotions, and possible solutions are once again to be reviewed by a group of interested ranchers, business interests, environmental advocates, and local government representatives. “After two years [since the first effort], the community is considering starting the planning again for a Groundwater Conservation District. The purpose of the group is to give guidance to [State Representative] Pete Gallego, so he can sponsor a bill when the legislature meets again in January,” Simpton said.

Creating a GWCD is, indeed, a legislative act authorizing a local, governing body to be elected and serve with the primary purpose of developing approved conservation measures to protect the integrity and health of subsurface aquifers in the county.

Del Rio LIVE! will follow this effort, explaining issues and perspectives as we go along, striving to report opinions, facts and histories pertinent to this timely topic. Reader feedback – via e-mail or in reply to online stories at www.delriolive.com – is not only encouraged, but will amplify and enrich the discourse on this subject affecting us all.

The trouble with water – and there is trouble with water – is that they’re not making any more of it. They’re not making any less, mind, but no more either. There is the same amount of water in this planet now as there was in prehistoric times.

People, however, they’re making more of – many more, far more than is ecologically sensible – and all those people are utterly dependent on water for their lives … for their livelihoods, their food, and increasingly, their industry.

Humans can live for a month without food, but will die in less than a week without water. Humans consume water, discard it, poison it, waste it, and restlessly change the hydrologic cycles, indifferent to the consequences:

Too many people, too little water, water in the wrong places and in the wrong amounts.

--- Marq de Villiers, Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource, 2000

Questions or comments? Contact Bill Sontag directly.