The Dallas City Council put on its Monday meeting agenda, then removed, a proposal to share in funding a feasibility study on the proposed Marvin Nichols Reservoir. This proposal would authorize the City of Dallas to join with water groups such as the Sulphur River Basin Authority for a feasibility study of the reservoir, which is a plan proposed by the state to address long-term water needs in the Metroplex. The cost to Dallas would not exceed $600,000.
City officials there are not saying why the proposal was taken off the agenda. But Northeast Texas opponents of the reservoir are claiming credit for raising Cain about the issue which, they said, looked like a back-door ploy to start the permitting process for reservoir construction.
Michael Burke, executive director of the SRBA, said the authority's contract (for the study) with Dallas is the same contract it has with the other water entitites, including the North Texas Municipal Water District, the Tarrant Regional Water District, the City of Irving and the Upper Trinity Regional Water District.
"It's nothing really new," said Burke. "We've been waiting a year and a half to two years." Burke said it's not a new study, just another part of a larger study, such as the economic development study that was presented in March of this year. "This is the site selection portion of the feasibility study," he said, noting it was something the SRBA had been working on for a year.
[COMMENT: The release of the March study coincided with the still highly controversial "closed meeting" in New Boston. R.]
Opponents of the reservoir, though, saw something else afoot in the wording of the Dallas agenda item. Max Shumake of De Kalb said what Burke is saying and what the agenda item says are two different things. "This is to apply for the application which is, in essence, starting the Marvin Nichols construction," he said.
Burke said that simply was not true, and this was just a housekeeping matter awaiting Dallas' approval.
An excerpt from the background material contained in the agenda states: "This agenda item authorizes the City to enter into an agreement with the Sulphur River Basin Authority and other area water purveyors to study the feasibility of actually constructing the reservoir." It goes on to say: "The costs for preliminary design permit application and other engineering services are estimated to be $4 million from now through FY 2006, of which the City of Dallas' pro-rated share will not exceed 15 percent or $600,000."
Burke said officials are not trying to get the reservoir included in the regional water plan, and this has nothing to do with getting permits or anything like that right now. "We are the entity set aside to develop water resources, that's why we are working with them," he said. "They are still wanting to pursue this avenue."
Dallas City Council Member Steve Salazar said Mayor Laura Miller pulled the item from Monday's agenda, but he didn't know why. A representative of the Mayor's Office could not be reached for comment Friday.
Another reservoir opponent, Jim Thompson of Cass County [member of Region D], said he received an email from someone who had spoken with the Mayor's Office. That email indicated Miller pulled it because of the controversy.
Shumake said opponents had people working all over the state to get the agenda item pulled from consideration, and if it was to remain on the agenda, to get it defeated. "It's definitely just more than some more studies," he said.
Shumake wondered why the water districts weren't spending their money on determining the feasibility of obtaining water from Lake Wright Patman, or somewhere else, since the reservoir has been downgraded from potential to proposed status. He also said the matter has not been discussed at any Region C or Region D water group meeting or SRBA meetings. Shumake said supporters may just be slipping something by the public. "It's for their share in the first step in building Marvin Nichols," he said.
Burke said the SRBA hasn't done anything in secret, and it has been very open at its meetings. The Dallas agenda item is just part of a long project. "We have a five-year project that gets us in the position to apply for a permit," he said.
Salazar said while he hadn't studied the item in depth, Dallas is just one of the public institutions that are able to finance such a project. "The region is just looking to the future and trying to look 50 years down the road," he said. "There is no justification to build it today, just go ahead and start the studies."
Maybe what almost happened at the Dallas City Council meeting related to funding a feasibility study on the proposed Marvin Nichols Reservoir was merely a housekeeping chore, as reservoir supporters contend. Maybe it was an end-around ploy to begin work on a project that might find favor in the Metroplex but is vigorously opposed in far Northeast Texas, as opponents contend.
What there is no "maybe" about is that the Sulphur River Basin Authority -- appointed to protect the water interests of this area -- has lost the trust of the people it purports to represent. Trust, once lost, is hardly ever recovered.
Hence the big flap over an agenda item for the Dallas City Council's Monday meeting. City officials, acting on that item, would have agreed to ante up $600,000 for Dallas' share of a feasibility study for the controversial reservoir. SRBA and Dallas officials say this purely was a housekeeping chore, to get all the money together for a study. Reservoir oponents took one look at the wording of the item and saw it as taking a step toward getting a permit to start work on a project they thought they had stymied at least for the time being.
In the end, Dallas Mayor Laura Miller pulled it from the agenda because of the controversy.
SRBA officials contend they have been open and above-board since the authority was set up. They have maintained they have only pursued the reservoir because its construction is inevitable. They said they were trying to make the best of a situation in which metropolitan interests will overcome East Texas environmental and economic development concerns.
Opponents, who do not subscribe to that inevitability, have asserted that SRBA officials are, in essence, puppets dancing to the tune of big-city pipers. They believe the SRBA has flown beneath the radar deliberately to slip the reservoir into the state's long-range water plan.
Where the truth lies is anybody's guess. And one person's truth is never the same as another's. At any rate, distrust flows more mightily than any good intentions dammed up behind this reservoir.
To change the perceptions about the SRBA, it seems, would be harder than to change the course of a river. The SRBA, in its current incarnation, likely will never be able to convince locals that it has not somehow sold out to the water hogs west of the Sulphur River.