Category: Uncategorized

By Jaime Moore-Carrillo

Fort Worth Star-Telegram, October 30, 2024

Dozens of sign-bearing, jean-sporting northeast Texans packed the meeting hall of a community center outside Pittsburg on Wednesday afternoon.

A roughly 30-mile drive north along U.S. 271 — two and a half hours from Fort Worth — sat the subject of their fears and frustrations: tens of thousands of acres of forest, pasture, and wetland some Texas water planners hope to convert into a 66,000-acre reservoir preemptively christened Marvin Nichols.

What Metroplex officials tout as a necessary and sensible strategy to plug future holes in the region’s water supply, critics dismiss as a pointless, damaging boondoggle, putting their livelihoods and businesses at risk.

The North East Texas Regional Water Planning Group (dubbed Region D) convened the Oct. 30 meeting to afford Dallas-Fort Worth water planners another chance to respond directly to their concerns. A cross section of northeast Texans — county officials, ranch hands, timber cutters — took turns sharing their seemingly unshakable objections.

“I know, that you know, that this is just a land grab. This is more greed than need,” said one landowner living near the site before inviting reservoir proponents to have dinner with his family. “You can send the Texas Rangers, the FBI, and the National Guard, and I will not leave.”

North Texas officials first conceived of Marvin Nichols in the late 1960s. Tensions surrounding its future intensified in the 2000s, as Dallas-Fort Worth’s surging population laid bare the long-term inadequacies of its water reserves.

The officials tasked with managing the Metroplex’s water insist the reservoir is an economical way to help hydrate the millions expected to relocate to the region in the coming decades. They’re hoping to slot the project into the 2027 State Water Plan — a Legislature-approved guide for Texas water management.

“We know conservation isn’t going to get us where we need to go,” Kevin Ward, the chair of the Metroplex’s water planning authority (Region C), told an unsympathetic audience. “We’re going to need water.”

Constructing the $7 billion lake would require damming the Sulfur River and flooding more than 100 square miles of land near Cuthand, a ranching community of roughly 300 about 35 miles southeast of Paris. The massive man-made pool, slated for completion by 2050, would submerge portions of Red River, Titus, and Franklin counties.

The Texas Legislature in 2007 deemed it a “site of unique value for the construction of a reservoir,” given the area’s ample surface water and the comparatively low estimated costs of sending water to consumers — in municipalities stretching from Henderson County to Wise County.

At full capacity, engineers said the facility will store 1,532,000 acre-feet of water — just under 500 billion gallons, or 757,575 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Around three quarters of the lake’s annual yield (361,200 acre-feet) will be funneled to the Metroplex; the rest will be fed to municipalities surrounding the basin. (Fort Worth used an average of roughly 225.6 million gallons a day last year, according to the city.)

The Texas Water Development Board presented a “feasibility review” of Marvin Nichols, conducted at the behest of skeptics, at a meeting in Arlington late last month. It concluded that the undertaking had no insurmountable barriers — logistical, financial or otherwise. The reservoir’s adverse impacts, it forecast, would be manageable, if not minimal.

The lake would cover only 0.031% of the region’s prime farmland, according to state officials; it would swallow 7.7% of timber resources in the three counties. The decades of construction needed to bring the project to fruition would pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the economy, they added, more than offsetting any potential economic losses.

Critics contend the study downplays the reservoir’s potential economic damage, having not adequately consulted local business owners. Its environmental and cultural impacts have yet to be fully explored.

Building a new reservoir, they added, won’t curb the wasteful consumption habits of DFW homes and companies already straining the area’s water supply.

“I’m a son of the soil,” one Region D board member said. “If I have a shortage of grass for my cattle, I don’t go buy more cattle.”

Should turning off sprinklers or taking fewer baths not ease the burden, Region D officials recommended that their western neighbors instead source extra water from Wright Patman Lake, a 32-square mile reservoir blanketing farmland and forest just west of Texarkana.

“I know they have water needs. Marvin Nichols isn’t the way to do it,” said Jim Thompson, the chair of the Region D planning group. “We’re not trying to hoard resources; we’re trying to preserve resources.”