History Lesson 
Boone Pickens Wants To Sell You His Water
And you’re going to need it, eventually, since Texas’ most precious natural resource is being depleted at an alarming rate. His plan is to pump vast amounts from his land in the Panhandle and pipe it to parched cities like El Paso and San Antonio—for a hefty price, of course. But other powerful interests have the same idea. Let the battle begin.
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Grabe was convinced that conservation programs and enforcement are effective. Average per capita use in El Paso has dropped from 200 gallons a day to 159 gallons since conservation measures became law ten years ago. That compares to an average 230 gallons in Dallas. But it’s going to take more than that, he said. “The city is going to have to eliminate turf grasses from parks someday and eliminate all front-yard grass over time. New pools are already required to have filtration, as opposed to the old drain-and-fill method of cleaning.”
Drought anywhere in Texas is devastating. In El Paso it’s a permanent condition that threatens the city’s economic expansion. That has prompted Ed Archuleta to develop several strategies, including a desalination plant to treat up to 29 million gallons of brackish and otherwise undrinkable water daily, of which there is an abundance in the Hueco Bolson and other groundwater in West Texas. He is also making more deals to purchase water from irrigation farmers who control the water rights of the Rio Grande. “There’s enough water within 150 miles of El Paso to take care of our needs for the next fifty years,” says Archuleta. “We have that before we need to look at importing it from farther away.” Considering that the part of Texas beyond the Pecos River has more than seven million acre-feet of groundwater, the biggest potential sources of all are local ranches. The city has purchased two ranches near Van Horn and Valentine over the past eight years for the express purpose of mining water from deep underground pools and piping it back to El Paso. It is currently eyeing a third area around Dell City, west of the Guadalupe Mountains, where irrigation farming has thrived from the one aquifer in the region that can be refilled by rain.
Pumping water from Valentine and Dell City seems inevitable. Valentine’s water is exceptionally sweet; Dell City’s water, though salty enough to require treatment, is renewable. You can pull 50,000 acre-feet a year out of the aquifer, and nature replenishes it with runoff from rains. The big trick is building a pipeline to get that water to El Paso. That’s where a gentleman from El Paso named Woody Hunt enters the picture.
Hunt owns the Hunt Building Corporation, whose core business is constructing military housing. He’s the first University of Texas regent from El Paso, appointed by then-governor George W. Bush. He was a major contributor to Bush’s gubernatorial and presidential campaigns. He is also an unabashed true believer in El Paso’s future.
In March Hunt Building released the findings of a year-long study concluding that construction of a pipeline from Valentine, Van Horn, or Dell City to El Paso is feasible and that water can be delivered to El Paso at reasonable market rates. The study also hinted, not surprisingly, that the Hunt Building Corporation is the ideal entity to build the pipeline and have water flowing into the city within three years. In exchange for that effort, Hunt Building would have what amounts to complete control over El Paso’s imported water. It would also be able to orchestrate where future development will occur, courtesy of the rule of capture, because Hunt Building has also purchased 5,000 acres of farmland in the Dell Valley. The company’s likeliest partner in this venture is Philip Anschutz, the Denver tycoon who owns almost half of the 40,000 cultivated acres in the Dell Valley. As a major investor in Union Pacific Railroad, he also controls the right-of-way crucial to the construction of a pipeline.
“In the past few years, Woody Hunt made a conscious decision to invest in developable properties in El Paso,” says Hunt’s spokesperson for water operations, John Edmonson, “and in particular, high-quality long-term developments that are ten-, fifteen-, twenty-year projects like you see in Tucson and Albuquerque.” Hunt Building owns more than a thousand acres between Interstate 10 and the Franklin Mountains on the western edge of the city and controls another one thousand acres through partnerships.
“The city of El Paso isn’t running out of water,” says Edmonson. “The question is, Where is the future water coming from? As developers, one thing that has to concern you is the ability of that community to grow, and a big component of that is water and the availability of water. That’s the basis of Hunt Building’s interest in water. Woody cares a great deal about El Paso. That’s why I’m here. We want to tell developers and corporations that they can invest $35 million in an El Paso project and know they’ll have water.”
The billboard on the road into Dell City that proclaims it the “Valley of the Hidden Waters” is faded, with flecks of rust around the edges. Every other building on the edge of this community of six hundred is vacant. As many fields in the distance lie fallow as are under cultivation, reclaimed by the desert. The Dell Valley has a striking beauty. It is a high flatland among the extinct volcanoes and bare rock slopes of the Cornudas Mountains to the west, separated by a long ribbon of salt flats from the Guadalupe Mountains to the east. When red chiles are dangling from the bushes and a light powder of snow dusts the peaks, there’s not a more majestic view of Texas’ highest range.
Mary Lynch says she never gets tired of looking at the Guadalupes. “It’s sacred to me,” she says. “I just think it’s beautiful.” She’s admiring the view outside the offices of the Hudspeth County Heraldthe weekly she edits and her husband, Jim, publisheswhich last November declared in a front-page headline “New Water Wars on the Horizon; Get Ready to Fight.”
Jim Lynch’s family arrived in the Dell Valley around 1950 from the Central Valley of California, where they had learned firsthand the miracle of irrigation. The Dell Valley has been explored for oil and gas, and though little was found, a tremendous amount of groundwater was discovered. Farms popped up like mushrooms. Almost overnight more than 40,000 acres went into production. Through the fifties and sixties, cotton, an extremely thirsty plant, was the valley’s main crop. Dell City had six cotton gins. Since the eighties, when commodity prices plummeted, agriculture has declined. Ninety percent of what’s currently farmed is alfalfa, another water-intensive crop. The remainder consists of chiles, winter grains, silage, and to a lesser extent, tomatoes, melons, and other truck-farm crops. Phillip Anschutz has 150 acres in wine grapes.
The Lynches’ paper has been covering the rural-urban water battle in West Texas longer and in more detail than any media outlet in El Paso or elsewhere, long enough to realize the increasing odds against holding on to their way of life. “We all know El Paso is bigger than any of us, and if they choose to take this water, we don’t have the money collectively to fight them,” says Jim Lynch, brushing back his snow-white hair. “Whether you’re right or not, if you have the money to stay in court, I can’t stay with you. Phil Anschutz is one of the wealthiest men in America. If he’s together with Hunt, there’s no stopping them.”
The rising cost of irrigation—more than $100 an acre and climbing as fast as natural gas prices—has already been squeezing farmers over the past several years. “Some people have the attitude that if they can get more money for their water than for farming, then why farm?” Lynch acknowledges. “A lot of us take a longer view and would like to preserve the rural atmosphere and the farms and see the valley prosper.” But Lynch realizes that it’s unlikely that both will be accommodated. What he’s afraid of is that El Paso or entrepreneurs like Hunt will cut deals with two or three people to take the water, cutting the rest of the community out. “My thinking is, if we have to give up our water, all of us should share in the money. If a few farmers sell out, they’ll make money, the water will diminish, and everyone else will have to go out of business without compensation.” It is not, he admits, a bright future either way. “Up until this, we admired Mr. Hunt for his success, his civic contributions, his buildings. But if he uses his power to take our water and dry up our community, we’re not so admiring.”
Two years ago, the prospect of El Paso sucking Dell City dry was unimaginable to Gene Lutrick, a strapping farmer who wears overalls. Now he’s been converted to Tom Beard’s line of thinking. “I used to be very strong on the rule of capture,” Lutrick tells a noon gathering of the Dell City Chamber of Commerce, of which he is president. “But I’ve been educated. I don’t know if we are going to lose our rights. El Paso, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin—they’ve got the votes. If they dry up Texas, they can still import farm products. But where am I going? I’ve been farming here fifty years. I am very opposed to a gallon of water going out of our district.”
The town of Fort Stockton is in the middle of that vague West Texas transition zone where the Permian Basin becomes the Chihuahuan Desert and flat-top mesas turn into mountains. It is known largely as a major food-fuel-motel way station along Interstate 10. For most of its modern history, its sole reason for being was Comanche Springs, the most abundant springs complex this side of the Balcones Fault. Native Americans frequented the springs for thousands of years. Anglo and Spanish explorers, along with adventurers, plunderers, tradesmen, and thieves, relied on it on their long treks west for the same reason, as did the stage lines and the railroads.
The springs also provided for hundreds of small farmers east of town. An intricate system of canals and sluice gates delivered the springwater to the crops. It was said you could float in a tube from the springs to a spot fifteen miles east of town. But in 1955 landowners west of town, including Clayton Williams, Sr., one of West Texas’ most distinguished civic leaders, drilled wells and installed diesel pumps to feed their crops and newly planted fields of pecan trees. Comanche Springs went dry. Without water, the people left and the farms disappeared. You can still see traces of the farms and where the canals were and make out the symmetrical furrows in the desert. The ditches and sluice gates remind me of old photos of the planet Mars I saw as a child showing evidence of Earth-like rivers and streams. They’re signs of a lost civilization, as secret and occult as the water beneath my feet.
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