The Return of the Water Hustlers

In 1960, John Graves published a book that was to become a classic work of Texana and a classic of the conservation movement. The book was Goodbye to a River, an account of his last canoe trip down a stretch of the Brazos River before it was flooded and destroyed for the benefit of faraway cities.

In 1971, he followed up by contributing a portion of a book titled The Water Hustlers, in which he and two other writers described the arrogance and corruption of various big-city water project promoters whose mode of operation was to simply ignore the rights and interests of rural landowners, farmers, and ranchers in order to concoct ever more grandiose dams and pipelines to take water away from one group and sell it to another.

Well, they're back again. To preserve the God-given right of north Dallas suburbanites to spray millions of gallons of potable water over their Day-Glo-green lawns throughout the 100-degree Texas summers, the powers-that-be in north Texas are once again demanding the power to seize land and rivers and water rights belonging to someone else, elsewhere in the state.

The latest scheme, recently approved by the legislative shills in Austin, proposes to build yet more dams, including one on the Sulfur River and one on the Neches River. All this despite the fact that public opinion in East Texas is firmly against these projects which seek to seize and destroy massive swathes of the region for the benefit of Dallas suburbanites.

Farmers, loggers, and environmentalists aren't the only ones affected.

Goodbye to a Railroad?

From Railroad Newsline:

The North Texas plan calls for about $3.3 billion to be spent on new lakes, including $2.15 billion for the 62,000-acre Marvin Nichols Reservoir on the Sulphur River and its 130-mile pipeline to North Texas. Two 32,000-acre lakes and another of about 7,500 acres would be built.

An additional 200,000 acres or more could be taken from landowners in a mitigation process that is required if prized bottomland habitat is flooded for the reservoirs. The proposed Lake Fastrill would flood four miles of the Texas State Railroad State Park and most of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's proposed Neches River National Wildlife Refuge.

Employers and landowners said the plan would be detrimental to East Texas.

Kevin Driscoll, manager of International Paper's Texarkana Mill, which has about 860 employees and an annual payroll of about $70 million, said his mill would be hurt by the loss of water to new lakes.

Bill Ward, president of Ward Timber in Linden, said the plan would "cripple the timber industry."

Said Max Shumake, a sixth-generation Texan whose family settled the Sulphur River area in the 1840s: "I don't see the need to give up my heritage to water someone else's grass."

I'm sure those who stand to profit from such projects would tell you that it's just a happy coincidence that their shills in Austin have recently declared fiscal war on the Texas State Railroad despite its long and successful history, its prominent role in bringing movie productions to the state, and the thousands of visitors who enjoy it each weekend.

That famous Dallasite love of the free market and property rights? Well, suh, it ends where other people's property begins.