Protecting environmental flows in Texas – the work continues
Faithful readers will recall that environmental flows involve the “quantity, quality and timing of water that are necessary to sustain the fish and wildlife of a river, wetland or coastal zone,” according to the Texas Living Waters Project. The protection of environmental flows is critical for a healthy environment as well as a thriving economy. But experts are warning that the vitality of our streams, rivers and estuaries is at serious risk from flow depletion.
One of those experts is environmental attorney Myron Hess, who authored a report in 2021 titled “Delivering on the Unrealized Potential of Senate Bill 3 for Achieving Meaningful Environmental Flow Protection,” which was the subject of a recent issue of this column. With the opening of the 89th Legislature last month and the expansion of the Texas Water Caucus to include both the Texas Senate and the Texas House, hopes are high that lawmakers will be focusing on water issues this session. Our Water Matters caught up with Hess to sound him out about the prospects for legislation to better protect and promote environmental flows.
“My top objective for flow protection,” says Hess, “would be for the state to allocate funding for an endowment to support the purchase of water rights for flow protection. Most people who donate rights for flow protection can qualify for an income tax deduction, but having funding to pursue acquisitions in key locations will be critical for making significant progress.” A novel idea to stretch this allocated funding would be “to get some holders of water rights to do a combination donation/purchase to help the funds go farther.”
Another approach could involve allocating “a portion of water made available for use through state funding, but not consumed in that use … for flow protection.” For example, “The Legislature provided that 5% of the firm yield of reservoir projects within 200 river miles of the coast in which the state was a financial participant, under certain financing approaches, would be allocated to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for protection of environmental flow,” according to Hess. “Those provisions have never been triggered, but some variation of that approach makes sense going forward.”
Funding is also needed from the Legislature “to cover costs for getting the statewide science advisory committee and, on a sequential basis, basin and bay expert science teams back in action.” Hess asserts that this “science work is a critical predicate for progress.” Groups like the Environmental Flows Advisory Group (EFAG) rely “heavily on the science input — and that science work won’t happen without funding.” EFAG “is the group charged with studying approaches for flow protection … and they will need expert support to make that happen.”
One of the aspects in greatest need of attention is the state’s approach to planning. “The issue of flow protection remains largely out of sight, out of mind,” according to Hess, “[because] no progress has been made on incorporating planning to meet environmental flow needs into the water planning process.” The current process “quantifies demands for meeting the various consumptive uses of water and then proposes ways to meet those demands. That makes for an easily understood problem to work on. [But] [t]he amount of water needed to maintain adequate environmental flow levels is not recognized as a demand to be planned for. That makes for a problem that is easily ignored.” The state needs “a truly comprehensive water planning process that includes planning to meet flow needs.”
Hess argues that another major obstacle to realizing the promise of Senate Bill 3 is “a general lack of understanding about how water is managed and about what future river flows might look like. Water rights management and the relationship between groundwater and surface water are not broadly understood by the general public and even by many decision-makers. As a result, I don’t think there is much appreciation of the level of risk the bays, rivers, and springs in Texas face and what that means in terms of economic impact and quality of life.”
When asked how Texans can work to overcome these obstacles, Hess responded that people need to “understand that our rivers and coastal bays are at real risk. I also want them to understand that we can meet human water needs, including the need for healthy rivers and bays, if we plan comprehensively to do that.” Voters can contribute to this effort by “letting politicians on all levels know that this is an issue [they] care about.” Meanwhile, “folks who hold water rights that are no longer needed for other uses can donate all or a portion of those rights for flow protection. Donations to the Texas Water Trust can be made for a defined period or in perpetuity.”
The time to act is now, warns Hess. “The longer we wait to get serious about flow protection, the harder it will be to get it done.”
Visit https://www.twdb.texas.gov/waterplanning/waterbank/trust/index.asp to learn more about donating water rights to the Texas Water Trust.
Trey Gerfers serves as general manager of the Presidio County Underground Water Conservation District. A San Antonio native, he has lived in Marfa since 2013 and can be reached at tgerfers@pcuwcd.org.
