On Wednesday, 30 October 2002, at the Gilmer Civic Center, Region D Water Planners held the official discussion period for the Marvin Nichols Reservoir amendment to the Texas Water Plan. As Prashansa Sai reported in Texarkana, there were about 170 people in attendance, which was a smaller crowd than some of us had anticipated. There was a wide diversity of speakers who were for the amendment and against the reservoir. Only one, the Mayor of Clarksville, spoke in favor of the lake, and she was soundly booed and hissed by members of the Red River County contingent.
Appended below is a copy of the statement that I read and later presented to the board, along with copies of my two books. In the set of documents submitted were the following items:
(1) My June 25 Open Letter
to the SeRBiA, with its 5 Attachments
(2) My Certified Letter
to SeRBiA on June 26
(3) My Letter to Governor
Perry on July 12
(4) My Aborted Statement
to the SeRBiA Steering Committee on July 23
(5) Randy Loftis' September
16 Reservoir Article in the Dallas News
Shirley Shumake presented the board members with a collection of exotic acorns from endangered oak trees in the Sulphur River Bottom. Shirley showed me and the Westons some of these acorns at the Dalby Store recently. I had never seen them before and presume that many board members had also not seen them.
Following my statement is the report of the meeting by Prashansa Sai in Texarkana. And starting on Thursday, October 31, a series of anti-Ratliff ads began to appear in various local newspapers in anticipation of next week's election. To read these ads, click here. Roberto
Good afternoon to members of the board and to the public. I am Robert Russell of Mt. Pleasant. I am an historian, writer and photographer; and I have brought along copies of the two books which I co-authored with my late father Traylor Russell, who was for many years the Mt. Pleasant city-attorney, as well as a professional historian and genealogist. These books are Some Die Twice and From Indian Springs to the River Jordan. They were published in the late 1970s around the time that Region D Chairman Tony Williams was serving as the Mount Pleasant City Manager. Mr. Williams knew my father and even attended some of his lavish shrimp-buffet Christmas parties at the old Hotel Stephens on the Square, now long gone as are so many other historic buildings in Mount Pleasant and elsewhere.
Although my father was the attorney for the water board when Lakes Monticello, Bob Sandlin, Cypress Springs and Welsh were constructed, I seriously doubt that my father would approve of the Marvin Nichols and George Parkhouse Reservoirs simply because of the wanton historical destruction that would occur. If these four large lakes were ever built, God forbid, the entire Sulphur River Bottomland, as we know it today, from Texarkana to Cooper would vanish. In its place would be a series of six reservoirs stretching for almost 100 miles, as the crow flies. Many historical cemeteries would have to be relocated. My father would never have approved of the disappearance of all these old cemeteries, to cite one example.
Since the Sulphur River is mentioned throughout our books, I'll present these books to the board as part of the official record of these proceedings. If you need two additional copies to send to Austin, please let me know; and I'll be most willing to provide them. They should certainly be considered by the Department of Antiquities, which must permit the destruction of possible historical sites, and the Sulphur River Basin is certainly quite historical.
Also for the record, I have for presentation to the board a 40-page set of documents which are self-explanatory and which can be viewed by the public at my website, SulphurRiver.Net, as well as at your office in Hughes Springs.
Regarding the proposed amendment to the Texas Water Plan, you have included the following sentence in the additional paragraph, inserted into the proposed amendment as the seventh paragraph in Chapter 6.1(v): "The further site-specific studies should include, without exclusion, the following topics: mitigation effects, economic effects, effects on local property owners, effects on taxing entities, future water needs of potential consumers, conservation and use practices of potential consumers, environmental effects, effects on the agricultural and natural resources, and alternative viable water management strategies." There is no mention here of desalinization as an option for Marvin Nichols. Perhaps you should include an additional sentence, specifically suggesting desalinization as an alternative to more dams and lakes.
On April 29, Governor Rick Perry suggested that the State of Texas spend $208 million on an experimental desalinization plant. This was reported by The Dallas Morning News on April 30, as follows: "'It's time to look for new and untapped sources,' Mr. Perry told an audience at a San Antonio Water System plant near downtown. 'There's no greater potential supply of new water than what splashes upon hundreds of miles of Texas coastline.' Mr. Perry said he would ask the Texas Water Development Board, working with regional water-planning panels, to assemble details for a demonstration plant to strip the salt from ocean water to create drinking water that can be piped around the state. With the state's population expected to nearly double in the next 40 years, he said, 'we can't wait to address the issue of a safe, abundant water supply. We have to make plans today.' The state has a number of small inland desalination plants, but none along the coast are comparable in size to facilities in California and Florida."
In December of this year a new desalinization plant will commence operation at Apollo Beach, Florida, near Tampa Bay. Construction of this plant was approved in March 1999, so in less than 4 years it will have gone from the drawing-board to full operation. Contrast that to the estimated 28 years needed to construct the Marvin Nichols Reservoir. This Florida plant was built next to an electric power-plant and was able to take advantage of certain existing facilities, which reduced its construction cost by about 30%. Factoring that in, then the actual cost of this plant would have been around $160 million, which is $48 million less expensive than the experimental plant proposed by Governor Perry.
According to a Dallas News feature about this new plant on August 9, "The 25 million gallons of [daily] drinking water is extracted from 44 million gallons diverted from the power plant flow. It's pumped through sand and 7,000 tightly wound acetate membranes, stripping away metals, phosphorous, nitrogen and tiny sea critters. The water comes out so clean, it has to be run through lime to give it the taste people expect. It will be mixed with other water at a treatment facility 14 miles away before being pumped into houses."
These 14 miles refer to the length of an 8-foot-diameter pipeline from Apollo Beach to this treatment facility, and the cost of this pipeline was part of the overall cost of the water plant. Florida, incidentally, already has 175 desalinization plants. This new desalinization plant will be the largest in the Western world, second only in size to a plant in Saudi Arabia, which produces 50 percent of the world's distilled water.
Some people have expressed the irrational concern that if we desalinate too much seawater and dump that salt back into the sea, then the sea would become too salty and marine life would be threatened with extinction. To allay such fears, this salt by-product could be refined and used at least for livestock salt, if not table salt. The sale of this salt could be used to offset the costs of this purified water to consumers. I know from experience in the Peace Corps in Massaua, Eritrea, where salt was extracted from seawater by evaporation, that Japan would be an excellent potential market for any salt extracted by Texas desalinization.
This new Florida plant will initially produce 25 million gallons of water per day and eventually reach a peak capacity of 35 million gallons per day. And its size covers only 8.5 acres of land.
The State of Texas water planners could build 10 of these Florida-style plants for the cost of one Marvin Nichols Reservoir. They could be finished in less than 4 years, not 28 years. They would require only 85 acres of land, not 72,000 acres (excluding mitigated land). They could produce a total of 350 million gallons of water per day. And the combined project could also include a 140-mile-long pipeline. These plants could be built along isolated beaches and not disturb a single human being or shore animal, and not require the relocation of a single cemetery.
According to a Northeast Texas Regional Water Plan Reservoir Site Assessment Study dated 4 September 2001, the ideal, maximum, annual output from the Marvin Nichols Reservoir would be about 550,000 acre-feet of water. There are 325,851 gallons per acre-foot. Multiply these two to obtain a total of 179,218,050,000 gallons of water per year from the Marvin Nichols Reservoir, or let's say for convenience about 180 billion gallons of water per year.
If there were 10 Florida-style desalinization plants on the Texas Gulf Coast, each producing 35 million gallons of water per day, or a combined output of 350 million gallons per day, in one year's time they would produce 365 times 350 million, or 127,750,000,000 gallons per year. That is approximately 50 billion fewer gallons per year than could be obtained from Marvin Nichols even under the most favorable of conditions, but with proper conservation measures in the DFW Metroplex, 130 billion gallons of water per year should be quite adequate to meet their future needs through the mid-century when, after all, the Marvin Nichols Reservoir would already be obsolete, as has been stated time and again, in study after endless study.
In this same Region D report it states, "The annual firm yield from Marvin Nichols I under the operating assumptions above is estimated at 624,000 acre-feet/year (557.4 million gallons per day)." This is about 75,000 acre-feet more than the previous estimate in this same report, showing that often when reading these reports, one wonders exactly what to believe. These amounts seem terribly optimistic to me, when one actually eyeballs the terrain of the land to be covered by water and considers if really a billion gallons of water every two days could be pumped from the Marvin Nichols Reservoir.
This 2001 report also states, "The acquisition of land and easement requirements includes land in the conservation pool to elevation 312.0 and flood easements for land above the conservation pool subject to the probable maximum flood elevation 319.1. The take area for the reservoir system for purposes of this study is assumed to correspond to the conservation pool of about 62,125 acres plus the additional surface area attained at another 5 ft above the conservation pool elevation, which together is approximately 72,825 acres." In other words, 10,000 acres of land, even if flooded, would be no deeper than five feet. As far as I am concerned, that is an absolutely outrageous and totally unnecessary degree of destruction - a technologically useless reservoir bordered by a 10,000-acre white-oak swamp!
Perhaps 35-40 years ago there was indeed a real and even "urgent" need for the Marvin Nichols and George Parkhouse Reservoirs. In that day and time desalinization technology was still experimental. However, in the ensuing half-century this technology has proven itself to be most reliable and efficient, especially in Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Marvin Nichols and George Parkhouse Reservoirs are dinosaurs of technology and should be abandoned as obsolete.
On September 16, Texas Governor Rick Perry said in an interview with the Dallas News, "It appears to me that if Dallas solely relies upon the building of Marvin Nichols, they could miscalculate. We know how long it takes to build a reservoir. There's no guarantee that, with the environmental impact that this could have on the State of Texas, that it couldn't stay in the courthouse for decades. I want to make sure that Dallas has an appropriate supply of water, and I think we need to be looking for other alternatives to Marvin Nichols." And as was noted, those "other alternatives" mentioned by the Governor certainly include the desalinization of seawater from the bountiful Gulf of Mexico.
Thank you.
GILMER, Texas -- Opponents of the proposed Marvin Nichols Reservoir spent two hours Wednesday urging members of the Northeast Texas Region D Water Planning Group to pass an amendment that would delete the lake and dam from the regional water plan.
The committee is expected to vote on whether to accept the amendment at a Dec. 2 meeting in Mount Pleasant. The vote will come at the end of a 30-day public comment session that beings today and during which individuals can send written comments to the NETRWPG stating their opinion regarding the lake and reservoir [sic -- Prashansa probably meant amendment].
"This is not an issue about water, but rather about private property ownership, human dignity and freedom," said Robert Canfield from Bogata in Red River County. His vicinity will be most affected by the construction of the reservoir. "My land is my domain ... it is my cloak of respectability," said Canfield, who used to live on the outskirts of Dallas that is now Lake Ray Hubbard. "When I had to move back in 1964 (when that lake was being built), I felt like a second-class citizen ... like I was being discriminated against ... like I had no rights. That's what one feels like when they have their private property confiscated."
The purpose of Wednesday's meeting was to allow the public to express opinions to the regional water planning group regarding the amendment to withdraw the proposed reservoir, said Tony Williams, committee chairman. The hearing, held at the Gilmer Civic Center, drew about 170 people.
The discussion of whether to consider such an amendment came about a month prior to the September meeting, when members of the NETRWPG decided they needed to take action. At the time, they were acting to requests from District 1 State Rep. Barry Telford and District 1 U.S. Congressman Max Sandlin to postpone the construction of the reservoir until further studies regarding its full economic impact on Northeast Texas.
Many members of the public who spoke on Wednesday agreed that the full economic effects of the proposed lake are not known, and what was known has shown to be detrimental to the timber, logging, farming and ranching industry in Northeast Texas. "This lake would cripple the rural and local economies of Northeast Texas," said John Bradley, a Region D committee member who spoke on behalf of the Texas Forestry Association.
David Nabors of Paris, Texas, agreed. "Literature from [Willie Nelson's] Farm Aid will tell you that one in five farms fold as it is because of the present economy. How many will go down because of this lake? Who will replace the tax base that will be flooded by this lake?"
Al Hills, representing the executive director of the Atlanta Economic Development Corp., said after much discussion with city officials, the corporation decided the lake would not be economically advantageous for the city of Atlanta or for Cass County. "If this lake is built, we are looking at eating 235 acres of personal property either through flooding or mitigation and that is going to be detrimental to our tax base," he said [sic].
The effects of the lake on personal property and homesteads especially pulled on the heartstrings of many opponents who at times emotionally explained to the committee what the Sulphur River bottoms mean to their families.
Maud resident George Frost explained that it simply didn't make sense to ask the people of Northeast Texas to change their way of life in order to accommodate strangers in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. "We, the people of this land, feel that our concerns have been ignored to fast track this process by dam advocates," he said. "Flooding and mitigating our land while shipping 80 percent somewhere else and retaining only 20 percent that we don't need just doesn't make sense."
A significant point of frustration for opponents is the fact that the Northeast Texas area was even considering building a lake. Studies show the Northeast Texas area does not need the man-made lake to supply future water needs. "There have been several U.S. Corps of Engineers studies that state that our region does not need water from this reservoir, so it's obvious that the construction of this lake is not to meet our water shortfalls," said Oran Caudle, an environmentalist from Texarkana. "So what is it about? Dallas/Fort Worth, that's what. But they could utilize the water from Lake Texoma and Toledo Bend, which would supply three times as much as the Marvin Nichols Reservoir ever would. All assertions that the metroplex needs this water are completely baseless."
Fellow environmentalist Dr. James Presley, also from Texarkana, agreed. "Dallas/Fort Worth has sufficient water, and they have all the water they will ever need from existing reservoirs," said Presley. "The Marvin Nichols (Parkhouse) schemes are only about money ... to enrich a handful of men at the expense of many."
The majority of the opponents were upset and bitter, but conceded that they were glad the Region D committee was taking them seriously enough to consider an amendment to withdraw the reservoir.
"I am really impressed by this group. ... Everywhere I go, people are talking about Marvin Nichols and the steps this group is taking," Janice Bezanson, executive director of the Texas Committee on Natural Resources, told the committee. "It is not easy for a body to look at their work and see where they have made a mistake. Thank you."
On Sunday, October 27, the younger R.B. Palmer of the Mount Pleasant Daily Tribune endorsed Ratliff for State Senate, saying that his opponent was not qualified for the job. Next to that endorsement was a letter to the editor from Valree Guest in Bogata. Then on Wednesday, October 30, the elder R.B. Palmer also endorsed Ratliff, saying that he has "done us proud" in Austin. Next to that endorsement was a letter to the editor from Kimberly Dyer Vavrecka of Franklin County. Here are both of those letters to the editor, followed by an article in the Tribune on November 1 about the October 30 Region D meeting. Roberto
"Dear Editor:
"You are about to lose a big part of your county to Dallas-Fort Worth.
"That's right! Seems like Sen. Bill Ratliff has turned his back on the people who elected him and joined a group in Dallas-Fort Worth.
"They will take our homes, churches, cemeteries, the whole communities and flood them. 72,000 acres for the lake, 200,000 plus dry land for the wild life. Nothing for us humans.
"This is our place in the world. It's our lives, we have rights. We need a lot of help.
"It's been proven that DFW does not need the water. This is just a group that wants the property and water rights. They are working through the water planning board. Dallas-Fort Worth has turned down water from other lakes.
"I urge each of you to get groups together and attend the next meeting at the Gilmer Civic Center on Oct. 30 at 2 p.m. Let these people know they can't take over Northeast Texas and displace the people and take everything we have worked all of our live for, our homes. Valree Guest, Bogata"
"Dear Editor:
"In response to your recent support for Bill Ratliff ... shame on you!
"Do you have any idea what this man is trying to do to your friends and neighbors? Are you aware of the destruction that he so readily supports in building the Marvin Nichols Reservoir?
"Does it matter to you that he is so callous that he would sell out the very people who have supported him?
"Maybe it's time for you to get out of the office and open your eyes to what is really going on around you. Bill Ratliff is nothing more than a money-hungry, back-stabbing politician that will tell you whatever you want to hear to get your vote, then turn around and take from you whatever he wants. Be very careful, take heed in whom you put your trust and who you support to control the world around you.
"As for your support of Bill 'Rat'liff, the Mount Pleasant Daily Tribune will now be added to the list of businesses to boycott.
"Kimberly Dyer Vavrecka, Fourth Generation Land Owner, Franklin County, Texas"
At a public hearing in Gilmer this week, Region D water planners were given plenty of reasons to approve an amendment that proposes a downgrade in status of the Marvin Nichols Reservoir from "proposed" to "recommended". [Actually the correct term is "potential". Roberto]
Around 140 people gathered in the Civic Center, most in opposition to the controversial lake which would inundate around 70,000 acres in southern Red River County and northern Titus County. The $1.7 billion cost of the project would be covered by Dallas/Fort Worth who would in turn receive 80 percent of the water. In addition to the acreage required for the reservoir itself, an undetermined number of additional acres would be required for mitigation, or set aside to lessen the impace on wildlife in the area.
Of the 31 people who addressed the group, only one, Ann Rushing, the mayor of Clarksville, spoke in support of the project. Her request for continued study, and news that the Clarksville City Council and Red River Commissioners' Court had passed resolutions in support of the reservoir were greeted with boos and hisses from the audience as she left the microphone.
Others brought news more welcome to the majority present. Max Baines, Precinct 4 Cass County Commissioner, reported a resolution passed by his commissioners' court in opposition to the project. Shannon Wilks, with a statement from International Paper, reported his company opposed construction of the dam because of "the potential negative impact the reservoir would have on a significant amount of renewable resources." The Texas Forest Association, represented by John Bradley, came out against the project at the hearing for similar reasons. Bill Ward, owner of Ward Timber Company [in Linden], recorded his opposition to the reservoir, citing a study by the Texas Forest Service at Texas A&M, which concluded a probably negative impact on the Northeast Texas timber industry.
Environmental groups were also represented, and thanked the water planning group for their actions. Janice Bezanson of the Texas Committee on Natural Resources remarked that people all over Texas who deal with water development or conservation issues were talking about the group's amendment proposal, and she praised them for "doing something very courageous."
"The speed and thoroughness with which the people have risen up and said, 'This is what I think,' is probably unprecedented," she said after the meeting. "And for a deliberative body like this to reverse what they've done, it indicates that there's a true grass-roots communication to decision makers. This is being talked about."
She further encouraged the water planners to make their counterparts in Region C understand that "they are spending their money on an expensive reservoir when they could get water for a lot less money."
The majority of those addressing the group were individuals urging the 22 voting members on the group to pass the amendment. Many described the land they stood to lose, others listed alternative water supplies Dallas has available to them, including water conservation, and still others asked the water planners to go further still, and take the reservoir off the plan entirely.
The two-hour meeting ended with Region D Water Planning Group chairman Tony Williams thanking everyone for their participation. "Two-hundred individuals so far has submitted written testimony," he said.
According to law, the group cannot make a decision on the amendment for another 30 days. They will reconvene on December 4 at 2 p.m. in the Titus County Extension Service Building on Industrial Boulevard in Mount Pleasant to vote on the proposal.