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WATER POLITICS

Via Inside Climate News, a report on how Laredo has long sought a secondary water supply to supplement the Rio Grande. A development in Webb County could provide a solution—but one with a hefty price tag.

The Walker family property at the intersection of I-35 and US-83 in Webb County is a rugged expanse of scrub brush, cacti and a few cattle. But the South Texas family envisions a $7 billion logistics and housing development called Talise rising from the ranchland. 

A trailer parked on the dusty highway advertises the future with images of a smiling woman next to a horse and a juicy steak. The Talise website features renderings of sleek apartment buildings and stately ranch houses with names like “The Springs” and “The Retreat” and a video of families splashing in a pool. The first phase of an industrial park, the website notes, includes a million square feet of warehouse and office space.

Talise means “beautiful water,” its promotional brochures say. The 13,000-acre project that broke ground last May near Laredo, the nation’s busiest land port with thousands of northbound trucks passing through daily, may well need a lot of it. And that could be a problem as surveyors for the developer as well as environmental advocates have found the groundwater meant for the community to be slightly saline and in need of costly treatment.

The Walker family, a well-known ranching family and one of the largest landowners in Webb County, has created the Legacy Water Supply Corporation to develop potable water for Talise. Its plans include drilling into the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer. Legacy recently asked the city of Laredo and Webb County to join its water endeavor, promising to sell water to both when and if a treatment plant is built on the Talise grounds.

The Walker family’s ambitions as a developer and as a water supplier have risen as Laredo and other cities along the Rio Grande contend with dwindling water levels at the nearby Amistad Reservoir as well as a deepening drought. Laredo has long sought a secondary water source to supplement the Rio Grande. 

The dilemma in Laredo mirrors how other growth regions are challenged by water demands. In the arid West, the idea of pumping Mississippi River water to the Colorado River Basin has been debated for decades. From San Antonio to Fort Stockton to El Paso, water importation projects are sprouting up across the Lone Star State. Water rights to rivers and reservoirs in Texas have already been claimed, sometimes decades ago, leaving groundwater as the most viable new water source. That leaves communities looking to aquifers. Large landowners who hold the rights to water under their land are poised to cash in. 

The Walker family plans would mean drilling for water near the new development and building a 20-mile pipeline to Laredo. The water would be treated at an on-site facility to be built by Legacy. 

City council members and county commissioners voted separately to join the Legacy water board—even as questions remain about who will pay for what could be significant water treatment and transport costs. Laredo’s city manager Joseph Neeb will represent Laredo on the board. Neeb did not respond to multiple requests from Inside Climate News to discuss the Legacy board or the city’s involvement.

The Legacy Water Supply Corporation board meets in San Antonio, some 150 miles north of Laredo. The current board members are Kandy Walker, who is developing the Talise project, Melissa Johnson, who represents the Legacy Municipal Management District which will purchase the water for Talise, and attorney Raul Leal. Meeting notices are posted to the fence outside the Walker property but are not posted online.

City councilmember Melissa Cigarroa said in an email to Inside Climate News that joining the board allows the city to be “at the forefront of the discussion” about the development of the water source and continued cost-benefit analysis. She said because of “the on-going efforts” to secure federal and state funds, “there is not a determinate price to discuss.”

“There are still many questions to be asked and answered, and having a seat at the table with LWSC will allow us to do just that,” she said in the email. 

Laredo’s mayor has said that the city has signed a “memorandum of understanding” to support Legacy but as yet has no signed legal contract regarding water sales.

Legacy is registered as a nonprofit and its legal counsel has offered vague cost estimates in the past year. Legacy representatives have also said they will seek federal and state funds to cover the as-yet undisclosed total construction costs. 

Legacy has not provided cost figures in any public documents. No one has publicly calculated the potential cost or rate hikes to households. Inside Climate News requested construction proposals from Legacy under Texas public records law. Legacy did not release the documents and sent a request to withhold the information to the Office of Attorney General of Texas. Legacy said it is awaiting a determination from the office.

Laredo environmentalists, however, have posed questions and provided some on-the-ground reality checks about likely expenses. Tom Vaughan, the founder of the nonprofit Rio Grande International Study Center (RGISC), whose mission is to preserve and protect the river, was invited by Legacy for a visit and took a groundwater sample. Laboratory tests showed the water was too salty to meet state standards, he said, and would require treatment.

“The point is, it’s going to be very expensive water,” Vaughan said in a recent interview.

Tricia Cortez, RGISC’s executive director, said Laredo has more work to do before resorting to imported treated water. City officials should make decisions “grounded in science and data,” she said. “Laredo taxpayers and water ratepayers can’t be left in the dark with these significant decisions that will impact the future availability and cost of our water supply.”

David Earl, the attorney for the Walker family’s project, said the longtime ranching family is offering Laredo a chance to “help the city be sustainable” and he was optimistic the project will move forward.

“I think, in principle, the parties have all agreed that this is the direction they want to go,” Earl said in an interview with Inside Climate News. “But formally and technically, there are still documents that need to be finalized and negotiated to get there.” Earl said the Walker family has already spent more than $10 million developing the water supply. He said that if and when the expenses for the water system are recouped any additional profits would be distributed among the board members, in keeping with state law.

In Austin, legislators are debating how Texas should prepare for statewide water shortages. 

Bills moving through the Texas legislature present differing visions of how the Lone Star State can gird itself. Sen. Charles Perry of Lubbock is advocating for a “water grid” of pipelines that would move water long distances from the source, including other states, to places experiencing shortages. The Senate bill, passed on April 2, identifies desalination and treatment of oilfield wastewater as methods to develop more water resources. Other lawmakers, including House members, want more funds for fixing leaky pipes and expanding water conservation and recycling. The bills propose spending up to a billion dollars on the Texas Water Fund. The House bill remains in committee.

A City Fed by the Rio Grande

Laredo has relied on the Rio Grande, which flows as a natural border between the U.S. and Mexico, for water since its founding in 1755. What centuries ago was a small Spanish outpost is now an American city of 250,000 people. Nuevo Laredo across the river in Mexico has grown to 480,000. The Covid pandemic and subsequent relocation of manufacturing from Asia to Mexico attracted more industry to Nuevo Laredo, and trade across the border has increased steadily. More than 3 million trucks, or an average of more than 8,000 trucks a day, entered Laredo from Mexico in 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. 

Laredo has rights to 54 million gallons a day of Rio Grande water. These water rights are managed by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. That’s been sufficient to meet the city’s demand, with peak demand in 2024 reaching roughly 44 million gallons on August 22, according to utility interim director Walter Pishkur. 

But state and city water planners have projected that sometime in the 2040s this water supply won’t be enough. The search for alternative water supplies took on new urgency in 2024 as tensions rose between the United States and Mexico on the Rio Grande. Mexico is required to send water from its Rio Grande tributaries to the United States on a five-year cycle under the 1944 water treaty. The water is stored at the Amistad Reservoir, over 150 miles upriver from Laredo and the city depends on that.

As Mexico fell behind on its treaty requirements, the reservoir reached an all-time low in July 2024. Cities on both sides of the border restricted outdoor watering, among other conservation measures. Farmers downstream of Laredo in the Rio Grande Valley had already faced deep cuts to their water supply with the last sugar mill in the region closing because farmers were unable to irrigate cane fields. Many fear the water shortage could damage the Texas citrus industry, which has an annual economic impact of about $300 million, according to Texas A&M University’s Agrilife Extension Service.

Meanwhile, Webb County officially entered a drought in spring 2024. Laredo is now in extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a partnership that classifies drought and provides weekly maps online.

Laredo Mayor Victor Treviño has seen the river level rise and fall during his lifetime, but the growth has raised the stakes, he said. “We’re growing astronomically fast; our demand for water is going to be much more. The river is not going to be sufficient,” said Treviño, a practicing physician for more than three decades before he was elected mayor. “So what are we going to do?”

Planners have looked outside Laredo city limits to find viable groundwater for wells but there are scant options for municipal development. Almost all of Webb County is privately owned—much of it is ranch land—and highly concentrated among the country’s top 100 landowning families.

In Texas, groundwater is governed by the rule of capture. Landowners can pump groundwater without restrictions even if it impacts neighboring wells. Voters can choose to form groundwater conservation districts, which create groundwater management plans to reduce the impacts of over-pumping. Because there is no groundwater conservation district in Webb County, the Walkers are free to pump as much groundwater as they please.

The Walkers are among Webb County’s prominent ranchers. James Oliver Walker Sr. arrived in south Texas in the early 20th century and his sons, James Oliver Jr. and Gene Simeon Sr., followed him into the ranching business. By 2000, the Walker ranch holdings surpassed 250,000 acres, including the Talise property and several other non-contiguous parcels in Webb County.

“We’re growing astronomically fast; our demand for water is going to be much more. The river is not going to be sufficient.”

— Laredo Mayor Victor Treviño

Gene Simeon Sr. died in 2015. His adult children, Gene Jr., Patrick, Elizabeth and Kandy, began planning the Talise project in 2021. Gene Jr. and Patrick died in a plane crash in January 2024 while surveying the land, and Kandy Walker continues as a driving force for the development that within a generation will radically change the landscape. 

In September, she told the Laredo Morning Times that the family had envisioned Talise as a new city “that would represent the Walker family’s love of this land.” Walker, the chief executive of SE Legacy Development LLC, said Talise will position Laredo as a “leader in economic development in the state” and generate jobs. 

“In 15 years, we should see thousands of homes and luxury apartment developments filled with hundreds of people and families, enjoying all the amenities we will offer,” she told the newspaper last year. “A thriving Town Center filled with stores, shops, restaurants, health and entertainment venues. Successful and vital industrial parks creating thousands of jobs.”

Overseeing Groundwater

Laredo and Webb County are part of the Texas Water Development Board’s Region M, which last updated its regional water plan in 2020. The plan projected then that Laredo’s water supplies will be adequate until the 2040s.

Laredo’s water master plan, a separate document from 2022, notes that the city would be vulnerable if a spill, natural disaster or drought restricted its access to Rio Grande water. The city has investigated several areas where groundwater wells could supplement the supply in an emergency and as the city’s water demand increases. 

The Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer has high quality water farther north. Near the border in Laredo, groundwater quality declines. Finding drinkable water with low chlorides or salts that are recorded as total dissolved solids, or TDS in testing reports, is a challenge for many communities along the Rio Grande. 

State regulators require public drinking water to be under 1,000 milligrams per liter TDS. Water above that level must be treated with reverse osmosis, an energy-intensive and expensive process that strips chloride from water molecules. Water samples are sent to laboratories that test for substances including nitrates, arsenic and chlorides and then determine the treatment needed to meet drinking water standards. 

The developers for Talise first tested the water’s salinity from wells in early 2022, according to the Laredo water master plan. Those tests were “disappointing,” according to the master plan, because of “high” TDS levels. The report did not specify the exact TDS measurement. 

Legacy engineers continued testing in April 2022 and July 2023 at wells drilled on the Talise property. The new tests found water quality of 1,800 TDS and 1,300 TDS, according to documents posted on the Legacy website. 

There are several other groundwater options in Webb and surrounding counties with lower TDS levels that would not require intensive treatment, according to the 2022 Laredo water master plan. A property 40 miles northwest of Laredo in Webb County, called the Davenport Ranch, has water of “excellent quality” with results under 500 TDS, according to online documents from a city council workshop in 2022. 

Other groundwater sources in nearby Dimmit, Kinney and Val Verde counties were found to be under 400 TDS. Transportation costs could be higher depending on the distance from Laredo.

The water master plan included evaluations for the North Webb County, Dimmit County and Val Verde/Kinney County groundwater options, but no comparable evaluation for Legacy. The evaluations included cost analysis, projecting the cost for water between $3.16 and $3.49 per thousand gallons for all three options. The evaluations did not specify whether the costs included grants or loans.

Pishkur, Laredo’s interim utilities director, was appointed in October 2024 after a now-notorious episode when E. coli bacteria was detected in the water supply, triggering an 11-day boil notice. Pishkur, who has worked for private and public water companies since the 1970s, said he is confident that Laredo’s water supply is sufficient for now. He noted that, unlike other water rights agreements in Texas, the Rio Grande rights stipulates that municipal needs take priority over mining and irrigation demands. 

He said the city is in discussion with Legacy and interested in finding a secondary water source. But he stressed that reducing water loss from leaky pipes and reusing more treated wastewater will also be part of the equation. 

“Municipal use is priority water. That puts us at the front of the class,” Pishkur said. “However we should be part of the solution, not part of the problem. We should get much more efficient with the water we’re pumping.”

Legacy Makes Its Case

Before ground was broken at Talise, the developers approached the city of Laredo and Webb County to join the Legacy Water Supply Corporation.

In November 2022, Earl, the attorney for Legacy and the Walkers, presented the water project to the Webb County Commissioners Court, the county’s governing body, as a way to improve living conditions for some of the county’s poorest communities. Legacy could work with the county, he said, to provide water to residents of colonias, low-income housing subdivisions that have long lacked basic services including public drinking water and sewer lines. 

Earl also raised the possibility of USDA grants as a source of construction money for the water infrastructure.

The county commissioners voted at the meeting to approve a resolution expressing a desire to “cooperate and collaborate” with Legacy in “establishing the feasibility of a secondary water source and identifying funding sources.” There was one abstention: County Judge Tano Tijerina, the county’s highest elected official. Tijerina is married to Kimberly Walker and she is a cousin to the Walkers developing Talise. “Even though they are family, we have nothing to do with this project,” Tijerina said during the public meeting. “For optics, and optics only, I will abstain.”

More than a year after the county commission vote, Laredo City Council wrangled with water needs in a special session. On the day of the meeting, June 5, 2024, drought conservation measures were in place as the temperature hit 107 degrees. Council members pressed utility staff on how to improve the city’s water conservation and reduce waste. “We need a plan of action,” Mayor Treviño said. 

Earl, the Walker family attorney, stepped forward with a prepared PowerPoint about Legacy’s vast development and its potential to provide water to Laredo. Although Earl and Legacy were not on the meeting agenda, he and the project’s hydrologist Jordan Furnans presented a robust account of Talise’s potential. When pressed by council members on cost specifics, Earl said “it’s premature to talk about the cost of water.” 

Earl said the water could cost $2 per thousand gallons before transportation and the cost for Laredo could reach $3 to $4 per thousand gallons. But he said that figure was assuming state and federal grants covered all construction costs. He had no figure on construction or operation costs without government aid.

The city council voted unanimously to request a seat on the Legacy Water board. 

What Will be the Legacy of Legacy?

State Sen. Judith Zaffirini and County Judge Tijerina attended the groundbreaking of Talise on May 15, 2024. Kandy Walker was photographed with a shovel in hand. Zaffirini praised the Walkers and raised looming water risks. “They will leave the legacy of not only developing the inherent beauty of this land and its economic potential, but also being able to address the water shortage of this area,” she said.

Local academics and environmentalists—including Vaughan, the founder of RGISC—have raised concerns about who ultimately will pay for Talise’s growth and the Legacy water works. RGISC has been a stalwart environmental force since 1994, pursuing court battles and educating the public to protect the Rio Grande. 

When Vaughan visited Legacy, the developers turned on the pumps for its test well to show it was producing water. Vaughan took a sample and sent it for testing. He said lab results showed a level of 1,700 TDS, a high salinity level that should be a warning for taxpayers and elected officials. “It has to be cleaned up,” Vaughan said. “In this day and age, the only way to do that is reverse osmosis.” 

Given cost predictions, Laredo would be better off building its own desalination plant—and keeping municipal control—rather than relying on Legacy and bearing the cost of purifying and transporting water through miles of pipeline, he said. RGISC staff pointed out that desert cities like El Paso are pursuing and building facilities to treat wastewater for reuse as drinking water. 

Cortez, RGISC executive director, said project planning should consider affordability for Laredo residents. The city is 95 percent Hispanic or Latino, with 20 percent of the total population living in poverty. Hikes in water rates would have an impact, she said.

The Environmental Protection Agency considers water unaffordable for households that spend more than 3 percent of their income on water services. According to Duke University’s Nicholas Institute Water Affordability Dashboard, by that measure, water bills are already unaffordable for 17 percent of Laredo households. 

Earl acknowledged in February that Legacy water will be more expensive than what flows from the Rio Grande.

“Obviously, it would be higher than what the city is currently paying for free water from the Rio Grande and treating that through a system that it already has in place,” Earl said in an interview. (The water is not “free,” but Laredo has purchased numerous water rights over the years and then has access to the water year after year.)

Laredo’s city manager did not respond to questions about whether other water sources were still under consideration. City councilmember Melissa Cigarroa said that Laredo has memorandums of understanding with the City of Eagle Pass and with the Nueces River Authority to explore water projects. 

“The LWSC project seems to be the farthest along in development,” she said.