Sharing the Common Pool: Water Rights in the Everyday Lives of Texans

Foreword

[ ix FOREWORD I cross the Blanco River twice each day, driving from my home in Austin to work at Texas State University in San Marcos. Sometimes there is water in the river and sometimes there is not. The Blanco originates out in Kendall County, just below the Gillespie County line, south of Fredericksburg. It flows in a southeasterly direction toward Hays County, where I work, and before it gets to the county line, most of the river flow goes back underground through the river bed. The now-underground river continues to flow in the same direction and emerges again to the surface from the iconic spring at Jacob’s Well in the little village of Woodcreek. From there, the water flows down Cypress Creek through the city of Wimberley, where it again becomes the Blanco. Under current Texas law, if you tried to get a water rights permit for water in the Blanco from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, you would probably be unsuccessful, because the surface water in the river, considered the property of the state, is largely committed. On the other hand, if you wanted to drill a well up above Jacob’s Well, you could pump just about as much water as you are man or woman enough to pump with barely any regulatory constraints at all, because the state courts have ruled that underground water is the property of the landowner. And it’s the same water. Although this bizarre situation is illustrative of the most daunting conflict in Texas water law, it is only one of many peculiarities standing in the way of developing a water strategy for Texas that ensures both continued economic growth and environmental protection. To some extent , as Charles Porter points out in this easy-to-understand description of Texas water rights, this situation arises from a system that dates all the way back to when we were a colony of Spain, yet it affects a modern society that bears absolutely no resemblance to the lives and times of those who created it so long ago. As I write, Texas is facing a continuing drought that has stretched our water supplies to the limit and has no end in sight. We can only hope Foreword x ] that, due to changing climate, it is not the “new normal” and that, someday soon, it will end. Thankfully, state leaders have become increasingly focused on the issue and have begun to take steps to address our water needs by enabling the financing of new water infrastructure projects in the years ahead. Unfortunately, we simply cannot build enough stuff to work our way out of the most critical natural resource issue facing the coming generation. It will require the attention of every one of us as we try to move forward through a dense thicket of confusing, conflicting, and evolving water policies. That is why Sharing the Common Pool: Water Rights in the Lives of Everyday Texans is so timely. On these pages, Porter makes often-arcane laws and regulations understandable for the layperson and thus provides a most valuable service to those average Texans who seek to be better informed about this vital issue. Eventually, the Blanco joins the San Marcos River, which flows on down to its confluence with the Guadalupe, one of Texas’ most beloved watercourses. The Guadalupe provides water to cities like Seguin and Victoria on its way to the Gulf, where it ultimately nourishes the estuaries of San Antonio Bay and the habitat of a rich assemblage of coastal organisms, including the Whooping Crane. Thus, the river, which intermittently flows both underground and on the surface and whose waters are claimed in the one case by the state and in the other by private citizens , must be managed in the years ahead to continue to meet all the demands that are placed on it in the context of laws that are ambiguous at best. The more we can help our citizens understand our quirky system of managing our water resources, the better off we’ll be, and that is what this volume in our River Books series is designed to do. —Andrew Sansom General Editor, River Books ...