The War for the Colorado
From the West Texas Caprock to Matagorda Bay, a drought-prone river triggers animosities and provokes battles over its life-sustaining waters. Downstream and upstream interests loathe each other, farmers fear losing out to cities, and everyone is united against raiders from faraway San Antonio and Corpus Christi.
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All the LCRA can do to stave off that day is preach conservation and augment its supply. The authority encountered stiff opposition the last time it proposed a new reservoir, so general manager Mark Rose has been thinking of buying land and drilling wells under the rule of capture. Because there are already too many straws in the Edwards Aquifer, Rose has been looking south, where the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer contains plenty of groundwater. That’s probably where San Antonio will turn as well—and for that reason, whether it is over the Colorado or over the Carrizo-Wilcox, a major water battle between San Antonio and the LCRA is likely to erupt in the future. Meanwhile the river authority is paying a dozen lobbyists to protect its interests while the Legislature ponders the subject of water. Nobody at the LCRA can forget that state leaders once pushed them into giving 100,000 acre-feet to the CRMWD; what if one of the thirstier cities tried a similar end run around the river authority? It’s not inconceivable. “San Antonio is a big city with a lot of money,” said Bruce Wassinger, an attorney who works at the LCRA. “Water doesn’t flow downhill. It flows to money.”
THE COLORADO REACHES BILL LEHRER, a 72-year-old man with birdlike features and a mulelike stubbornness, about sixty miles before it empties into Matagorda Bay. In the past few years Lehrer has become a pivotal figure in debates over the Colorado. Near the small town of Garwood, five wide suction pipes that he owns reach down into the muddy red flow. Lehrer owns Garwood Irrigation Company, which delivers water to rice farmers. The company’s 175 miles of canals fan out over Colorado and Wharton counties like the branches of a tree. Rice is the biggest cash crop in the region, and the water the canals carry is considered the lifeblood of the area. In the past Lehrer has sold water only to farmers (at rates lower than the LCRA’s), but now he wants to sell part of his water right to Corpus Christi. And the water right that Lehrer owns is a private property right, meaning there is little anybody can do to restrict what he does with it.
It is highly ironic that Lehrer, of all people, should become a symbol of the urban usurpation of water, as his company has always served agrarian interests. Garwood is one of four irrigation companies, all formed at the turn of the century, that enabled the local rice industry to flourish. In their day the irrigation companies were major entrepreneurial efforts: Investors from around the country (including Lehrer’s paternal grandfather) subsidized the cost of digging the canals, thereby quadrupling or quintupling the amount of land that could be flooded for rice farming.
Lehrer never would have contemplated selling water to anyone but farmers except for an entirely unexpected windfall—one that came about after a long history of controversy with the LCRA. Animosity between the irrigation companies and the LCRA began almost as soon as the authority built its lakes, which curtailed the amount of water available to downstream users. After some legal wrangling, the LCRA agreed to make sure that the irrigation companies got the same amount of water they had used in years immediately before the lakes were constructed. Every day the LCRA measures the flow coming into its system, then passes along enough “run of the river” water to meet the quotas due the longtime water users downstream. If the river stops flowing, however, then even the irrigation companies have to buy water.
The Lehrers were never happy with this arrangement. In 1900 Garwood had filed a claim establishing the right to irrigate 40,000 acres of land. No amount of water was mentioned. In 1936, however, Lehrer’s father was persuaded to sign a contract saying the LCRA would provide him with enough to irrigate only 6,858 acres. “My dad complained about that, but the attorney said, ‘Go ahead and sign it, and I’ll get it straightened out later on,’” recalled Lehrer. The attorney was Alvin Wirtz—who, in a clear conflict of interest, also represented the LCRA.
Wirtz never did straighten things out. Over the next 52 years, Garwood paid $2.1 million to the LCRA for water—water the family believed should have been theirs for free. Eventually Bill Lehrer came to look on the LCRA as his own personal adversary. “They’ve been attempting to run us off for the last forty years,” he said recently.
During that period the LCRA acquired two of the area’s irrigation companies—the Gulf Coast Water Company and Lakeside. The farmers served by those companies are the ones who now rely on the LCRA’s interruptible supply. By acquiring the water rights of those companies, the LCRA expanded the amount its lakes are allowed to retain and prevented any newcomers from gaining access to the Colorado. The authority made repeated attempts to buy Garwood, but Lehrer wouldn’t sell. “I don’t think it’s healthy for the LCRA to control the river all the way to the Gulf of Mexico,” he explained.
Then, in 1989, after Lehrer had nearly given up hope of satisfaction, state officials ruled that Garwood’s water right was senior to anybody else’s on the river. They also ruled that the original 1900 claim entitled Lehrer to 168,000 acre-feet a year. That is about eight times the supply in Lake Austin. Even in the driest years, Lehrer’s rice farmers have never needed that much; the most they have ever required is 133,000 acre-feet, leaving Lehrer with a big surplus. “We were just sitting here gloating,” he says, “when all of a sudden people who wanted water started coming out of the woodwork.”
Lehrer will lose the right to any water he doesn’t use, so he has a strong incentive to sell. Among the parties that approached him were an electric utility, another river authority, San Antonio, and Corpus Christi. It rains 42 inches a year in Matagorda County, but only 28 in Corpus. The watershed that supplies most of the city’s supply was originally called the Wild Horse Desert, and it is not particularly productive. Another part of the city’s watershed lies in the Hill Country, where it rains more, but most of that water disappears into giant sinkholes that feed the Edwards Aquifer. Half the water that does make it to the city’s two reservoirs proceeds to evaporate as the region’s hot, dry winds drink it up. By far the biggest consumers of water in Corpus are the city’s fifteen petrochemical plants, and city officials believe the area’s future growth depends on securing new sources of water.
In 1992 Corpus offered Lehrer $15.8 million for his extra 35,000 acre-feet. Before Corpus could use the water right, however, it had to be changed into one permitted to serve municipal and industrial needs. Corpus also had to obtain permission for the water to travel to the Nueces River basin. When Lehrer learned that the LCRA was seeking to change the nature of an agricultural water right it owned, he promptly filed an amendment to the LCRA’s application asking if Garwood could do exactly the same thing. Then on January 30 of this year, Garwood filed an application to ask if the water can go to the Nueces River basin. Now the only thing standing between Corpus and Colorado River water is a ruling by the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Committee (TNRCC).
The TNRCC takes at least six months to rule on interbasin transfers and longer if there are objections. “We have what we call a balancing test,” said Bruce Moulton, who works in the agency’s water policy division. “We have to weigh the benefits and the detriments to the basin of origin versus the benefits and the detriments to the receiving basin. Will the water be needed in the Colorado in the next fifty years? Will it affect the economy of the Nueces River basin?” Lehrer is hopeful the TNRCC will rule in his favor: Because of a quirk of geography, most of the rice fields that Garwood serves lie in the Lavaca River basin, not the Colorado, so Garwood’s water already leaves its home basin.
Most years an additional 35,000 acre-feet could probably be pumped from the Colorado without affecting anybody else on the river. But dry years are a different story, and the possibility of Colorado water traveling halfway to the Rio Grande has caused consternation up and down the basin. The transaction disturbs those who depend on the Colorado because it looks like a harbinger of days to come, when sprawling urban areas that have outgrown their own supplies will start bidding up the price of other people’s water. Far upstream, the CRMWD has filed an objection to Garwood’s request. Because of their obligation to release water from Ivie if the Highland Lakes get low, CRMWD officials worry that if Corpus takes an extra 35,000 acre-feet, the reduction in the river’s overall supply may cause the LCRA to ask for water more often—water that the people of West Texas have paid dearly to collect. The LCRA also filed a letter of objection on February 14. “Show me how I’m not going to get hurt by it,” said Mark Rose.
FROM GARWOOD, OBLIVIOUS TO THE NOISY controversy it has stirred, the Colorado River moves placidly toward the coast. Before it reaches its union with the Gulf, however, some water is diverted to cool the tremendous heat produced by the fission reactions at the South Texas Nuclear Power Project. Some water irrigates grass on the turf farms that line this part of river basin. And some water is purposefully sent into Matagorda Bay, which without fresh water would quickly become a hypersaline environment that could not support young shrimp, oyster beds, and redfish. Rare birds flock to the area, drawn by the rice fields and the marine diet. It is increasingly hard to make a living as a commercial bay shrimper, but 7,500 people in Texas still do, and most of them at one time or another depend on the Colorado’s influence for their livelihood. More and more, though, the area relies on tourists, many of whom visit because of the sport fishing or the birds—again, because of the Colorado.
Finally the river merges with the Gulf. Last March I drove down Texas Highway 60 toward the Matagorda Peninsula. When I reached the shoreline, I found an eerie dead forest, covered in rotting seaweed. Up and down the sandy beaches were hundreds of trees, branches, and logs, gnarled into fantastic shapes. It was a little while before I realized that the strange decorations were the work of the storm that had hit the Hill Country a few weeks before. I was looking at flood debris, washed back up on shore by the tides. The Gulf had left it there, in one last word of testimony to the extraordinary force of water.
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