Brown and Caldwell, which publishes 7 excellent weekly water e-newsletters: California (daily); Arizona (actually the Southwest); Pacific Northwest; Great lakes; Florida; Northeast; and Southeast; (subscribe at www.bcwaternews.com) has unveiled its weekly Texas Water News. You can view the initial one at www.bcwaternews.com/TX/0228.html and subscribe at www.bcwaternews.com/texas/. I subscribe to four of these and find them chock full of excellent, timely information on water issues. You can also access international water news. BC's slogan is true: "No ads, no spam - just news".
There are a number of excellent articles in the first edition of the TWN. My attention was drawn to an opinion from Billy Bob Brown, a farmer and Texas Farm Bureau board member from Panhandle, TX, about plans to sell "surplus" Panhandle water from the Ogallala (High Plains) aquifer and ship it to Dallas and other cities. The piece originally graced the Dallas Morning News and you can view it at:
Brown was responding to comments made by Robert Morris of the Home Builders Association of Greater Dallas and other urban developers.
T. Boone Pickens, who gained fame as a so-called "corporate raider", has floated a scheme to pump ground water (I am unsure it would directly tap the Ogallala/High Plains aquifer system) from beneath his Roberts County ranch and sell it to Texas cities. I have heard him speak twice on this issue - once at a meeting in Traverse City, MI, and the last time at the inaugural Ground Water Summit in San Antonio in 2005 (www.ngwa.org/e/conf/0704295095.cfm). At the Summit talk he spoke of selling about 200,000 acre-feet per year. Pickens is a very engaging speaker; his talk had little in the way of technical details (in fairness, we did not ask him for such). At that time, his pitch to some Texas cities had not produced any takers - San Antonio had recently said "No".
This could get very interesting. But then again, it's about water.
"Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river." -- Mark Twain
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