The year is 1969, and revolution is in the air. Protests clog American campuses and streets. Richard Nixon enters the White House on behalf of his “silent majority.” NASA puts men on the moon. And the hippie counterculture threatens to remake the world in its image. It’s a kaleidoscopic time in which all things seem possible. Even the Texas Legislature—that citadel of chest-forward corruption and gleeful reactionaryism—is dreaming big. 

Lawmakers advance, with little debate or fanfare, an almost fantastical proposal. Problem: Texas is projected to run out of water by 1985 if something isn’t done, according to a state water plan developed in 1968. Solution: a modest proposal to divert an ocean of water from the Mississippi River below New Orleans, move it across Louisiana, and then harness nuclear energy to pump it more than three thousand feet uphill, in some cases, in open-air canals stretching as far away as Lubbock and the Rio Grande Valley. To store the bounty, vast reservoirs with as much watery acreage as Connecticut’s landmass would emerge from flooded river bottoms in East Texas. The price tag: about $90 billion in today’s dollars, just for capital costs. 

To help finance this grandiose vision, called the 1968 Texas Water Plan, the Legislature asks voters in 1969 to approve $3.5 billion in bonds, or about $30 billion adjusted for inflation. Critics blast the proposal as costly, destructive, and unnecessary. The Sierra Club describes the plan, with only a little hyperbole, as “the largest altering of the face of the earth ever yet proposed by man.” There’s also the small matter that, apparently, no one has asked the Mississippi River states whether they’re willing to part with their water.

The bond proposal narrowly fails, by about 6,300 votes out of 625,000 cast. And Texas manages to escape calamity. But the idea doesn’t die. 

It has been kicking around, zombielike, ever since. 

The year 2025 is too young to call it revolutionary yet. But the Texas Water Plan—or at least a modern facsimile of it—is back. Pointing to looming water shortages, one state senator has made it his mission to scare up vast new supplies, including quantities from neighboring states, and feed the bounty into a state-owned, state-run grid of pipelines. The idea is to move water from where it is to where it ain’t, generally from wet East Texas to the drier west. 

Instead of a mostly local patchwork of water systems—the reservoirs, treatment plants, and distribution networks that dot Texas—state Senator Charles Perry, a Lubbock Republican, envisions a multibillion-dollar statewide “water grid” to make sure Texas never worries about the resource again. He is proposing investing in desalinating salty Gulf water, cleaning up the chemical-laden fracking water used to coax oil from the ground in the Permian Basin, and injecting fresh water underground for later use. Meanwhile, he is involved in mysterious dealmaking with other states for their reserves. During debate over his legislation in early April, Perry alluded to talks with “one or two” neighbors—probably Louisiana and Arkansas—to contract for water. 

Perry, who did not respond to an interview request, brings a crusading spirit to his cause. “I cannot in good conscience leave this place without doing whatever I was supposed to do to secure water supply,” Perry told attendees at the Water for Texas conference in January, hosted by the Texas Water Development Board, a state agency. 

The whole shebang could cost $162 billion, according to an estimate by the Texas Water Infrastructure Network (TXWIN), a trade association. That’s a staggering figure—about equal to the state’s total annual spending. And it dwarfs the $80 billion worth of projects recommended by the state’s own official water plan, last updated in 2022.

“There are a lot of parallels” between the ’68 plan and today’s water-grid concept, said Ken Kramer, the former head of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club and a veteran environmental advocate at the Capitol. The staggering cost. The lack of robust debate. The vague talk of out-of-state water purchases. The impracticality of it all. 

“This concept, or some variation of it, has been rejected or set aside many times for a variety of reasons, including the enormous financial, energy, and environmental costs of such a water grid,” added Kramer, who is one of the few water experts willing to publicly criticize Perry’s idea. “The idea is that . . . you’ll never have to worry about water in Texas again. It’s utopia.” 

But there is the sense that if something staggering on this scale isn’t done, the state may be doomed. Perry has described his effort as the last, best chance to save the so-called Texas Miracle economy. The enormous growth that feeds that miracle—all those water-intensive new data centers, factories, petrochemical plants, and lawn-crazy housing developments—is straining aquifers and reservoirs to the breaking point. Without significant new sources of water, Perry argues, the growth machine could come to a halt. It’s already being chipped away: A private utility in the New Braunfels area, to pick one example, put a pause on nine new housing developments in March, citing a lack of water supply. 

At present, Texas uses around 15 million acre-feet of water per year. The official state water plan—a fun read!—estimates that by 2070, given projected growth, we could face a shortage of 6.9 million acre-feet during a bad drought. Perry thinks this is far too conservative an estimate. He told his Senate colleagues in April that by his own estimation, the state will be short 12 million acre-feet—enough to submerge the land area of Harris County in more than ten feet of water—perhaps as soon as 2050. He believes Texas must somehow nearly double its water supply by the time today’s newborns are in their mid-twenties. 

In crisis, Perry sees opportunity. “When we address the water [issue], Katy, bar the door,” he said at the January water conference. “We are the seventh-largest economy in the world. We can literally move ourselves to the top three pretty quickly when we can show people you can come here and you will have water to do it.”  

Perry has already relented, somewhat, on the grand scope of his plan. In legislation passed by the Senate earlier this month, the senator jettisoned a full-blown, state-owned pipeline network, instead directing the Texas Water Development Board to “facilitate joint planning and coordination” of the grid between developers and government. The House also seems inclined to let the water board decide which projects to fund.

Still, both chambers of the Legislature are moving forward with proposals that would commit the state to unprecedented spending on water supplies and infrastructure. Both the House and Senate have proposed a onetime infusion of $2.5 billion and a permanent revenue stream of $1 billion a year—$12.5 billion in new spending over the next decade. 

And Perry’s colleagues in the Senate seem willing to give him wide latitude. As Perry explained at the Water for Texas conference, few other senators understand what he’s up to. Most aren’t fluent in the arcane world of water issues, and they seem grateful for Perry’s zeal. During a brief debate earlier this month, at least one lawmaker praised the concept as “visionary.” 

The groundwork for his vision, Perry said, was laid in 2023, when the Legislature put $1 billion into the Texas Water Fund, an account overseen by the Texas Water Development Board that doles out money to fix leaky pipes and secure new water supplies. Of that, 25 percent—$250 million—was earmarked for a special account to pay for only certain kinds of projects: desalination (treating seawater or brackish water), aquifer storage and recovery (capturing and injecting “excess” water into underground formations for later use), produced-water treatment (treating water that’s been used in oil and gas production, such as fracking), and out-of-state water purchases.

“Nobody really understood the purpose of that bucket,” he said at the conference. “I did.” The $250 million was merely seed money. Now Perry wants to put billions more into that bucket. His Senate Joint Resolution 66 would require that 80 percent of new funding go toward his preferred types of projects, which would now include controversial new “shovel-ready” reservoirs. 

Given the mounting problems, there is broad consensus that the state of Texas has to step up financial support, but not all see Perry’s plan as the path forward. “We need a shitload of money,” said Perry Fowler, executive director of TXWIN, whose members would be building much of the infrastructure. But there is skepticism of funneling billions into a strings-attached fund for Perry’s new water supply when there are more imminent needs, such as dysfunctional wastewater-treatment plants that may threaten public health. Huge pipeline projects, such as a long-discussed main tapping the often full reservoirs of East Texas, are “very, very cost prohibitive,” Fowler said. “We need to pursue these big solutions, but we can’t do it at the expense of everything else, because that’s not responsible. And it’s not being realistic about the needs today and tomorrow.”

Texas has always done things on a grand scale. In the middle decades of the last century, nearly every major river was dammed and dammed again to control floods and give the booming state reliable sources of drinking water. Our system of oil and gas pipelines is almost extensive enough to reach to the moon and back. And the Gulf Coast is a marvel of industrial engineering—jetties and revetments, canals and vast Rube Goldberg–esque petrochemical steelworks sprouting alongside busy ports, rearranged river mouths, and paved prairies. The Ike Dike—a $34 billion plan to protect the Houston-Galveston region from hurricanes—is just the latest installment of a century-long project to conform the coast to industry. It’s arguable that Texas would still be a rural backwater if not for these mighty works. But hubris is part of the story too. 

The Trans-Texas Corridor—a Rick Perry–backed attempt to turn swaths of Texas into “supercorridors” for highways, rail, and utilities—never got off the ground, a victim of its own ambition. High-speed rail between Houston and Dallas has foundered for a decade and a half due to financing woes and objections from rural communities. The mostly forgotten ’68 Texas Water Plan belongs on this list of failed attempts at empire building. 

Now the Legislature seems committed to another generational investment in infrastructure. But as always, the line between boondoggle and success story can be thin.