Texas Legislative Update: Pristine Streams, HB 4146

Texas Capitol

On Tuesday, May 11, HB 4146, a bill that would protect pristine Texas waterways passed the Texas House with a bipartisan vote. The bill had passed out of the House Committee on Environmental Regulation with a 7-0 vote late last month on its way to the floor. Chair Tracy King, author of the bill and Chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, strongly dismissed opposition to the bill as nothing more than “red herrings” and “siren calls” in his floor speech prior to the final floor vote.

With some possible exceptions for municipalities, HB 4146 would prohibit discharges into pristine stream segments, specifically those that meet a specific criteria in having “a total phosphorus level below .06 milligrams per liter.” In Texas, streams are often broken up into individual pieces, or segments. Here, the bill only targets specifically those segments of streams that are below the total phosphorus level in the bill. This legislation takes into account a decade’s worth of environmental water quality data to assure that the most pristine of Texas’s streams are protected.

Primary opposition to the bill has come from developers and builders, primarily signaling that the bill would somehow stop all development in certain areas. This is untrue, of course, as there are already limits on certain discharges in some of the fastest growing areas in Texas like the Hill Country, and those limits have clearly not stopped development in and around the Highland Lakes.

These pristine streams, because of their low nutrient content (like low total phosphorus) are hypersensitive to changes that come from discharges. Rather than discharge wastewater into pristine streams, potential dischargers will instead be encouraged to find recycling uses for that water or use it for land application. This also makes the bill beneficial to individual landowners and communities living near these streams, as it protects some of the most exceptional natural resources that communities and landowners use for their own recreation.

“Our job is to protect those that don’t have a lobby, and these pristine rivers don’t have a lobby…” Chair King said in his closing remarks. “They have you and I to protect them.”

The bill’s passage from the House is certainly worth celebrating. However, it still has to make its way through the Senate before it could be signed into law by the Governor. HB 4146 has broad support across our partner environmental organizations including the Devil’s River Conservancy, Public Citizen, Texas Campaign for the Environment, and Clean Water Action, among others.