Behind Texas's Looming Crisis: Groundwater Scarcity

By Forrest Wilder, Texas Observer. Posted May 19, 2009.

Given this harsh reality, Baker says people in Hays County will have to decide whether to trade flowing streams and springs for growth. "It's a hard conversation to have because no one wants to have limits to what we do," he says. "But there's a carrying capacity to these systems."

Water watchers are keen to see what happens in western Hays County. It may hold clues to the future of the Hill Country. "Hays is the canary because it's so close to I-35," says Marbury, the EDF policy specialist. Many Hill Country communities are approaching the limits of sustainability, she says, but "Hays is more dire because I personally feel like they've reached the point of no return. Whatever decision they make will be extremely difficult. However, they need to make it soon."

Addressing the water crisis in western Hays County falls to a tiny governmental entity with one full-time employee, five volunteer elected directors, a volunteer geologist, and an $150,000 annual budget. The Hays-Trinity Groundwater Conservation District is one of 96 districts in Texas covering roughly half the state's landmass. The districts are supposed to be all that stands in the way of the rule of capture, the unique Texas law that essentially says you can pump as much water as you like, your neighbor's well or stream be damned. If you can pump it, it's yours.

To combat the inevitable depredations of the rule of capture, most of Texas' groundwater districts can collect taxes, meter wells, set minimum distances between wells, issue permits, and impose pumping limits. The Hays district has few of these powers. The man who wrote the legislation creating the district, former state Rep. Rick Green, an ultraconservative Republican from Dripping Springs who now lectures on the myth of the separation of church and state, designed it that way.

"Rick Green thought God would take care of our water," says Jack Hollon, a retired math teacher and member of the district board who grew up raising Angora sheep on a farm on the Devil's Backbone, near Wimberley.

Green's 1999 legislation exempted agricultural and single-family residential wells in the district from regulation -- 98 percent of an estimated 6,500 wells. The district has some authority over water utilities, which provide about half the water in the district. But developers are taking advantage of the district's generous exceptions by building small, dense developments that require homeowners to provision their own individual, exempt wells. Another perverse provision of the legislation provides that funding for the district primarily comes from a $300 fee on new wells.

"It's like trying to save the buffalo from extinction by selling buffalo hides," Hollon says.

In 2003, Hays voters "confirmed" the district by a 2-1 margin and elected a slate of directors, including Hollon, that was strongly pro-regulation. None of the anti-district candidates, backed by the Hays County Republican Party, won a seat. The group had little power, but that didn't stop it from setting an ambitious goal: preserving as much water for springs and streams as possible. When directors ran the numbers, it became clear that the aquifer was already tapped out.

According to groundwater availability models, the aquifer in western Hays County can sustainably yield about 3,400 acre-feet a year without unduly straining springs and streams. In 2008, pumping topped 4,600 acre-feet.

"We're operating at what we think the aquifer can yield and still maintain spring flow," says Hollon.

As Hollon and the other water managers stand by idly, the pumps proliferate. About 150 to 300 new wells are drilled in western Hays every year. The district has also identified at least 1,500 small tracts of land that are yet to be built on.

"I know enough about exponential numbers to be scared," Hollon says.

This summer will be a good test of the aquifer's limits. The Trinity is approaching the end of the rainfall boost it received in 2007, and the current drought -- severe, but not as prolonged as previous one -- may well deepen.

Absent the ability to set limits on production and require sufficient spacing between wells, sustainability activists are gloomy. As developments keep sprawling across Hays County, the streams will go dry with "increased frequency," says Andrew Backus, the district president and retired hydrogeologist who lives in Driftwood. "It will be exceptional when they actually flow."

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