I wish to respond to the front page article of the Gazette, 3/14/03 by Prashansa Sai, regarding the tightly controlled meeting of the Sulphur River Basin Authority, SRBA, and concerning the Marvin Nichols Reservoir boondoggle. First, I would like to point out that it was the obvious attempts by the proponents of the reservoir to push it to the point of no return, with as few people being apprised of the "public meetings" concerning their schemes, as legally possible, that initiated the suspicions of people like myself, who, inadvertently, learned what was going on, began to gather information, then decided to join the fight to stop it.

I have many questions that the space allotted for this article will not allow me to address. However, regarding Mayor Mike Huddleston's reported statement that the SRBA has been trying for well over a year to get their message out, my first question is, who were they trying to get it out to? Certainly, not to the public. If that had been the case, they could/should have held town hall meetings, with all proposers present, to explain it to the citizenry at the onset. Any project of this magnitude that they sincerely felt would benefit northeast Texas, particularly, the Texarkana area, would certainly have warranted such action.

The fact is, Texarkana is expanding, probably faster than DFW, and if we hope to attract new industry to our area, we need to have as much available water as possible. We cannot afford to let Dallas or anyone else take it from us because the truth is that factories who offer good paying jobs and economic growth are unlikely to locate where there is not adequate sources of water. Dallas surely understands that. Our elected officials need to be about protecting our interests, instead of that of the Dallas Metroplex. Huddleston readily admits, in the above referenced article, that I-49 will spur economic growth in our area. However, he fails to mention I-69, which will further expand future, economic growth. How can he or his co-proponents not perceive the importance of our preserving and protecting our current water supply?

I could hardly keep from laughing at some of the asinine remarks reportedly made at the New Boston meeting of the SRBA. Only the seriousness of the issue prevented me from doing so. Regarding the "facts" that have been presented during the past year, it seems that the stacks of graphs, charts, written and oral statements, etc., that have been presented are not facts in the eyes of the SRBA group because they fail to coincide with their own. This is only a further means of trying to mislead the public. Look at where the SRBA group is getting their so-called facts. They are getting them from engineering consulting firms who are already on the payroll of the SRBA and/or the City of Wake Village, where Huddleston is Mayor, all of whom stand to profit considerably, likely along with Sen. Ratliff, and probably other politicians, if the reservoir should be developed.

I agree with the statement by John Rutledge: "You can really twist statistics to support any kind of argument." He proved that in his reported remarks about Dallas' water usage, which are quite different from those of the Dallas City Council's as reported recently in the Dallas Morning News. In the second paragraph of the March 14 Gazette article Huddleston reportedly states that "the only reason the Northeast Texas Region D Planning Group and other governmental entities are against the reservoir is because they have only heard one side of the story." It happens that both Huddleston and his employee or partner, Mike Burke, serve on the board of that group and Huddleston served on their executive board until recently. In addition, the government entities he referred to originally favored the reservoir, having only heard his side of the story. They changed their minds after hearing from the opponents.

Finally, I want to make people aware that since the Marvin Nichols Reservoir is no longer considered a certainty, they are proposing another reservoir upstream from the Marvin Nichols location, in Fannin County to be named Lake Ralph Hall. If this goal is realized, they will still have control over the water flow into Wright Patman Lake and be able to sell a large portion of our water to outside interests. Every tax-paying voter in our area should become involved in this issue and fight to stop any other reservoirs from being constructed on the Sulphur River north of Lake Wright Patman. The Corps Of Engineers have already stated that the level of Wright Patman could be raised to take care of any additional water needs of Dallas, which would be far less expensive and far less detrimental to the logging industry and farmers and without confiscating homesteads. Why aren't they interested in that? Because the wheeler-dealers could not line there pockets that way.