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.
