The 89th Legislative Session opened on Tuesday, January 14, 2025. Today, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick released his appointments for Senate Committees. Patrick is famous in Texas as a partisan of all partisans who forced the state legislature into repeated special sessions on the "burning" issue of transgender bathrooms!
Perhaps the good news is the widespread admission by top Texas officials that our state is running out of water. Be sure to tell everyone, ya hear!
This includes Patrick's right-hand man who was unsurprisingly reappointed chair of the Senate Committee on Water, Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Senator Charles Perry, another Lubbock boy and the new Speaker of the Texas House, Rep. Dustin Burrows.
West Texas is the scene of at least two crimes against nature: the draining of the mighty but barely recharging Ogallala Aquifer (by multiple states) and the poisoning of groundwater in the Permian Basin related to uncapped oil and gas wells. We applaud the work of Sarah Stogner and this November 1st Houston Chronicle article, "Leaked memo details $100M emergency request to address Texas oil well blowouts, contamination." Quoting Sen. Perry from his commentary published in the December issue of the Texas Water Journal: "For Texas to sustain the rates of population and economic growth our state has enjoyed the last few decades, we must take action to secure additional water supplies."
We respect that Senator Perry knows a great deal about water, but herein perhaps lies the problem with his premise. Ultra-fast-paced growth is not all good, especially in a state that has let industry (including big real estate) off the hook for sharing in the costs of growth. The costs of infrastructure demanded to serve more and more people and more and more mass-industrial projects can be way better shared in Texas.
But our Legislature and state officials have left our local governments without the ability to even come close to keeping up with the costs of growth. Take impact fees, as one example. These are one-time fees paid by developers to help pay for some of the costs of infrastructure (roads, water lines, etc.) needed to serve new residents. Texas only allows cities to impose impact fees and they're very limited. Check out the impact fee chart to the right. Florida allows city and county governments to impose impact fees and in far more categories than Texas, including the big ones - public safety and schools. These are not allowed in Texas.
Though we're happy to see Senator Perry pushing desalination (brackish and ocean), and produced water treatment in West Texas oil fields geared towards "new water supply," we have a hard time believing we can do it all. The "all" now includes data centers, Bitcoin, and chip manufacturers that are placing excessive demands on our energy supply and probably water, though these facilities are not yet publicly required to report their water use.
In the case of chip plants, we have excessive water demands AND contamination to worry about. And, with data centers, we are seeing significant incentives accompanied by little disclosure. (See this LA Times article.)
To top it all off, there appears to be a nutty water plan by Governor Greg Abbott and Houston Mayor John Whitmire to consider piping Houston's "excess" water to West Texas! Oh well, at least this Gridzilla isn't about mass exports of precious groundwater as is continuing today through the "San Antone Hose" aka Vista Ridge.
We would be remiss without mentioning this News Nation story that went viral about this "Chernobyl" for the ranchers in Johnson County and lord knows where else.
The Coleman's Heritage Ranch disaster in Johnson County is in litigation. We hope to see it front and center in this Legislative Session. The Colemans have been walloped by mass contamination due to the highly toxic fertilizers the EPA allowed to be marketed as safe. It appears that forever chemicals (PFAS and PFOS) have forever poisoned their land as they watched their cows and horses go belly up, after the fish in their pond. The contamination was confirmed at Texas A&M.
Join us at LIV to end the poisoning of our politics and our water and land so we can protect our lives from nutty plans driven by partisan poisoning.
For the next LIV News:
We ask what could happen if/when the new Trump Administraion rounds up and deports the masses by heeling to what David Stockman calls "invasion propagandists"? The economist (formerly Ronald Reagan's "whiz kid,") David Stockman here calls the plan disastrous "half-assed economics". Stockman, who is thankfully bird-dogging DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), warns that if the mass deportations happen, the second Trump term will arrive as "stillborn."
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