The impossibly expensive plan to save Texas’s water supply

AUSTIN – Texas Monthly reports that the year is 1969, and revolution is in the air. Protests clog American campuses and streets. Richard Nixon enters the White House on behalf of his “silent majority.” NASA puts men on the moon. And the hippie counterculture threatens to remake the world in its image. It’s a kaleidoscopic time in which all things seem possible. Even the Texas Legislature—that citadel of chest-forward corruption and gleeful reactionaryism—is dreaming big. Lawmakers advance, with little debate or fanfare, an almost fantastical proposal. Problem: Texas is projected to run out of water by 1985 if something isn’t done, according to a state water plan developed in 1968. Solution: a modest proposal to divert an ocean of water from the Mississippi River below New Orleans, move it across Louisiana, and then harness nuclear energy to pump it more than three thousand feet uphill, in some cases, in open-air canals stretching as far away as Lubbock and the Rio Grande Valley. To store the bounty, vast reservoirs with as much watery acreage as Connecticut’s landmass would emerge from flooded river bottoms in East Texas. The price tag: about $90 billion in today’s dollars, just for capital costs. To help finance this grandiose vision, called the 1968 Texas Water Plan, the Legislature asks voters in 1969 to approve $3.5 billion in bonds, or about $30 billion adjusted for inflation.

Critics blast the proposal as costly, destructive, and unnecessary. The Sierra Club describes the plan, with only a little hyperbole, as “the largest altering of the face of the earth ever yet proposed by man.” There’s also the small matter that, apparently, no one has asked the Mississippi River states whether they’re willing to part with their water. The bond proposal narrowly fails, by about 6,300 votes out of 625,000 cast. And Texas manages to escape calamity. But the idea doesn’t die. It has been kicking around, zombielike, ever since. The year 2025 is too young to call it revolutionary yet. But the Texas Water Plan—or at least a modern facsimile of it—is back. Pointing to looming water shortages, one state senator has made it his mission to scare up vast new supplies, including quantities from neighboring states, and feed the bounty into a state-owned, state-run grid of pipelines. The idea is to move water from where it is to where it ain’t, generally from wet East Texas to the drier west. Instead of a mostly local patchwork of water systems—the reservoirs, treatment plants, and distribution networks that dot Texas—state Senator Charles Perry, a Lubbock Republican, envisions a multibillion-dollar statewide “water grid” to make sure Texas never worries about the resource again. He is proposing investing in desalinating salty Gulf water, cleaning up the chemical-laden fracking water used to coax oil from the ground in the Permian Basin, and injecting fresh water underground for later use. Meanwhile, he is involved in mysterious dealmaking with other states for their reserves. During debate over his legislation in early April, Perry alluded to talks with “one or two” neighbors—probably Louisiana and Arkansas—to contract for water. Perry, who did not respond to an interview request, brings a crusading spirit to his cause.