Thinking About Water in Texas

From the Texas Tribune:

""The proposed Marvin Nichols reservoir will never be built. The environmental, financial and social costs of pursuing this grandiose project are simply too huge to ever make it viable," Ken Kramer, the water resources chairman for the Sierra Club's Lone Star Chapter, said at a water development board meeting in May. 

Kramer said the Sierra Club dropped its opposition to Bois d'Arc last fall, when the North Texas water district agreed to pursue more aggressive water conservation and to commit to minimum streamflows in the Bois d'Arc creek after building the lake. But he said he expected it would be one of the last reservoirs to be built in the state. 

Some planners disagree, pointing out that almost 30 reservoirs are mentioned in the state water plan to shore up Texas' water needs in the next 50 years. 

But in a speech at the North Texas Water Summit this year, Gov. Rick Perry's legislative director, Ken Armbrister, cast doubt that most of those lakes would get built. He noted that one of the last completed reservoirs in Texas, O.H. Ivie, took more than 30 years to build. It is now only 17 percent full."