Big City vs. rural landowners in NE Texas lake fight

I don’t have a dog in this fight, except a belief that the DFW region often believes it can run over any opposition because big city people know what is best for everybody else, and because I covered the Marvin Nichols story for several years for the Paris, Texas, newspaper. I got to know the people fighting the lake – land owners, longtime residents who face loss of their land because people in DFW want green lawns.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Thursday, September 2, 2021

Fort Worth Can Meet Water Needs Without Taking East Texas Land For Marvin Nichols Lake 

By George Bristol

In northeast Texas, about 165 miles from Fort Worth, lies one of Texas’ most beautiful landscapes.

For two decades our fellow Texans there have lived with the threat of their ancestral lands being flooded. It isn’t because of mother nature. It’s because some in Dallas-Fort Worth want to dam a river and create a reservoir to meet our water demands. 

While plans for the proposed project, called the Marvin Nichols Reservoir, have shifted over the years, the current estimate is that the project would permanently flood 66,000 acres of private land in the Sulphur River Basin. Another 130,000 acres or so would be removed from private ownership to mitigate wildlife habitat losses caused by the project.

To put that into perspective, the entire city of Fort Worth is about 227,000 acres. Can you imagine more than a quarter of our city being flooded, with the water pumped elsewhere, and much of the rest taken from us under the power of eminent domain?

It’s unconscionable. Particularly when a combination of conservation and innovation can meet our water needs. 

There are other sources of water for our region to tap. The most obvious example is the 186,000-acre Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Louisiana border. It yields five times as much water as Marvin Nichols would produce. It was built 60 years ago, allegedly for water supply, yet only trivial amounts of the water have ever been used. 

Lake Texoma is another underutilized resource, right here in our backyard. Both should be fully tapped before any new reservoir is even considered.

A new reservoir hasn’t opened in decades, but two new ones are under construction to serve DFW — Bois d’Arc Lake and Lake Ralph Hall. I’m not opposed to all reservoirs, but I question the need, science, and cost of Marvin Nichols. 

Like most of you, I am a strong proponent of private property rights and a lover of the great outdoors. This project runs counter to those two values that Texans hold dear.

Reservoirs are the old way of doing things. They are not efficient because of water evaporation — we’d do much better to expand the amount of water reuse/recycling we plan. Reservoirs are devastating to local environments and wildlife and to the economies in nearby communities.

While other cities’ per-person water use is steadily going down, Fort Worth city planners’ current goal for conservation is for per person water use to increase over the coming decades. We can do better – and we must.

Current estimates put the price tag for Marvin Nichols at $4.4 billion. That money must come from somewhere, and our pocketbooks are the obvious source. 

The DFW area will have the power of eminent domain to force this land transfer on the people of northeast Texas. That is why residents there have loudly and vociferously fought against this project for decades. We need to join their fight.

Residents of Fort Worth should oppose this unnecessary project being perpetuated in our names. Our water planners need to hear from residents that we want to be on the cutting edge of conservation and innovation – not party to a project that would devastate our fellow Texans and keep our community stuck in a 1950s way of developing water.

George Bristol of Fort Worth is a conservationist, author, and civic leader and a board member of the Friends of the Fort Worth Nature Center.