Voters must now weigh the bargain that lawmakers struck on water
By: Sen. Carlos Uresti
Texas voters, the future of the state’s water supply will soon be in your hands.
With the Legislature’s passage of SJR 1 in the final week of the 83rd regular session, voters will get an opportunity in November to approve a constitutionally dedicated revolving loan fund for water infrastructure projects.
Lawmakers also passed a companion bill, HB 1025, that will jump-start the program with $2 billion from the state’s rainy day fund. It’s ironic that Texas is responding to current and future droughts with “rainy day” money, but the fund was created for just such a contingency.
According to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor report, 16.2 percent of the state is experiencing exceptional drought, the highest category. More than 32 percent of the state is in extreme drought, while more the 60 percent is in the severe category.
Almost the entire state, 96.5 percent, is abnormally dry. That means our water needs are as big as Texas. And with the state’s population continuing its boom, those needs are just going to grow in the future.
In addition to the proposed constitutional amendment and the supplemental budget bill, the Legislature enacted HB 4, a sweeping overhaul of the Texas Water Development Board that will require the agency to take an even more active role in water policy development.
Under HB 4, the reconstituted Water Development Board will have three full-time directors instead of six part-time commissioners, each with a personal staff in addition to the regular board staff. The board will adopt rules establishing the criteria for prioritizing water projects, based on a legislative directive that 10 percent be reserved for rural areas and 20 percent for conservation and reuse projects.
By restructuring this agency, establishing a constitutionally dedicated fund, and tapping the rainy day fund, the Legislature has created a great opportunity to make Texas more secure. Everything the future has to offer must be nourished with water.
The legislative session began with a wide bipartisan consensus that water would be a top priority, but along the way disagreements emerged over the best way to accomplish our goals. In the last few weeks of the session, differences between the House and the Senate threatened to derail the entire effort, but in the end compromise and statesmanship emerged.
As one of the Senate conferees on the House-Senate Conference Committee that worked out the differences on HB 4, I was proud of the bargain we struck on water. It was crucial to the success of the entire session, and ended up being perhaps the best example of the spirit of bipartisanship and compromise that has pervaded the Capitol since the session began.
Lawmakers worked hard to get the job done on this important issue. Now it’s up to voters to complete that work and put Texas on the road to a more secure future.
Sen. Uresti represents Senate District 19, which covers more than 35,000 square miles and contains all or part of 17 counties, two international ports of entry, ten state parks, 51 school districts, almost 9,000 miles of highways and county roads, and more than 29,000 producing oil and gas wells. The district is larger than 11 states and 124 Nations, and contains almost 400 miles of the Texas-Mexico border.
