By Ken Kramer, Water Resources Chair. Lone Star Chapter, Sierra Club
After an extended holiday hiatus, The Water Column returns to highlight a wave of water issues engulfing Texas and the Houston-Galveston region at the beginning of a new decade. Certainly, in the Upper Texas Gulf Coast much of the focus is on flooding and how to reduce the risk of future flooding (of course, many folks are still struggling to recover from previous floods). Last year The Water Column discussed the new state flood-related legislation and the initiatives stemming from that legislation that may dramatically shape how we mitigate future floods.
Flooding will be a major topic for future editions of The Water Column in 2020, but water in Texas is a story of droughts as well as floods. As a state – even in coastal regions such as the Houston-Galveston area – we experience periodic droughts, which may become more frequent and extended as a result of climate change.
Regardless of the future impacts of climate change, Texas has had devastating droughts in the past and inevitably will again. Texans of a certain age remember the “historic drought of record” of the 1950s – the worst multi-year drought in the state’s recorded history. “Recorded” is the key word here. Some tree ring studies indicate that Texas experienced even worse multi-year droughts in past centuries before modern rainfall records were kept.
Moreover, drought has continued to confront Texas in the 21st century. In 2011 much of the state suffered the worst one-year drought in recorded Texas history. Indeed, as of the first week in October 2011, right before the drought “broke” for many (but not all) areas, almost all of the state was classified as being in “exceptional” drought. Even the Houston-Galveston region – better known for too much rain at the wrong time – was in “exceptional’ drought, the highest level.
So, while we grapple with flooding on a recurring basis, we also need to manage our water supply to survive frequent droughts. Texas actually has a water (supply) planning process for that very reason. It may surprise you to know that Texas is actually considered a leader in water planning among the 50 states (some wags say that’s the good news and the bad news).
The current water (supply) planning process – which is different from the state and regional flood planning process created by the Texas Legislature in 2019 – stems from 1997 when the Legislature enacted what was known as Senate Bill 1. That legislation changed the water planning process from a “top-down” approach to a “bottom-up” one. Under the previous approach, the state water planning agency (the Texas Water Development Board) prepared a state water plan with recommendations for different water projects to meet future water needs. That plan, which went through many iterations, was usually put on a shelf and never really put into practice (which, given some of the proposed environmentally-destructive reservoir projects, was probably not a bad thing).
The 1997 law established a regional planning process. The state was divided into 16 water planning regions (the Houston-Galveston area is in Region H), and a planning group was created for each region. Each regional water planning group was required to develop a water plan for its region (subject to approval by the Water Development Board, however) with recommended water management strategies to meet the needs of the region over a 50-year time period even during a drought as severe as the historic drought of record (the 1950s drought). All sixteen regional plans were then to be aggregated into a state water plan, and the regional and state water plans were to be updated every five years.
How this water planning process has worked in practice is a long story. The important fact right now for the Houston-Galveston area is that the draft of the updated Region H water plan will be released in the coming month and will be the subject of public hearings in the region during April. Next month’s edition of The Water Column will summarize the draft regional plan and tell you how you may provide feedback to the water planners. Stay tuned for more information.