Thank God we’re not in Texas.
That’s not a sentiment you often hear in Louisiana. Our western neighbor, as some tell it, is a utopian model with nothing but good roads, good schools, an attractive tax structure and plenty of opportunity.
It’s no wonder that the Lone Star State is a major destination for Louisianans looking for a better life.
But those Bayou State expatriates may find themselves staring down some familiar problems.
Like in Louisiana, Texas officials are grappling with aging and crumbling infrastructure, especially when it comes to providing drinking water to residents.
A recent draft report by the Texas Water Development Board estimates that communities there will need $174 billion in repairs to their local water systems in order to avoid a major crisis in the next 50 years. That’s more than double the estimate the TWDB produced just four years ago.
Texas has a Texas-sized problem on its hands, and it’s getting bigger. And it’s complicated by a problem Louisiana, at least for now, doesn’t have: a lack of water supply.
Corpus Christi, for instance, could be just months from a water emergency, worsened, in significant part, by drought. Hundreds of miles away in north Texas, groundwater worries are a recurring problem, especially for farmers.
Texas’ supply issues won’t stay bound by state lines. Last year, a Texas firm inquired about purchasing fresh water from the Toledo Bend Reservoir in northwestern Louisiana. The deal, proponents argued, would generate significant revenue while having a minimal impact on water levels in the 186,000-acre reservoir, which is a popular fishing and recreation spot.
But the proposal was abandoned when the leaders of two Louisiana legislative committees, each of which would have had to approve the deal, sent a letter opposing it.
This year, a third legislator, state Rep. Rodney Schamerhorn, R-Hornbeck, is trying to prevent such transactions from happening in the future. Schamerhorn, who represents a district near Toledo Bend, has filed to prohibit Louisiana from selling “running surface water” for use in other states.
“This bill is to protect our natural resources. It's water. One day, oil and gas may disappear, and water will disappear if we're not careful,” Schamerhorn told the House Natural Resources and Environment Committee last week.
HB 599 is not a bad idea on its face. Selling Toledo Bend water, as , is a bad idea, at least for now.
But the bill’s narrow focus on “running surface water” distracts from the real need: a comprehensive water management plan for Louisiana. And unlike HB 599, such a plan must also include groundwater.
This idea has been discussed many times, but never implemented.
It could hardly be more urgent. Each of the handful of large data centers currently under construction will require significant water supplies.
For instance, company officials working on the Meta data center in Richland Parish notified the state that they might need as much as 23 million gallons of groundwater per day. Normal operations would require much less, they said, but still.
Other data centers in Shreveport, Boyce and West Feliciana are not as big as Meta’s site. But their water needs will still be significant.
All of this is why Louisiana needs a comprehensive water strategy more than it needs another piece of small-ambition legislation. As part of any such plan, the state needs to conduct a full and transparent audit of supply, both on the surface and under it.
Louisiana has long acted like it has an inexhaustible water supply, but we really have no idea how much we have. Until we know that, we can’t know how much we can use and how much we can sell. It may be, in fact, that Louisiana can reasonably profit by selling some of its abundant water supplies.
Rebecca Triche, executive director of the Louisiana Wildlife Federation, highlighted this fact even as she spoke in favor of Schamerhorn’s bill.
“So, we're not even sure how much water we could sell or permit or what that impacts on priority users. In the absence of a comprehensive management plan, this is very prudent to put in place,” she told the committee.
So Louisiana would find itself in a place we know too well: with no real strategy or solution, just a cobbled-together collection of narrowly tailored regulations.
Those may solve local problems, but they do little to move the state forward.