Not wavering to the insistence and fresh reassurances of Texas water planners, opposition to the construction of the Marvin Nichols Reservoir remains deep and firm.
Critics of the prospective 66,000-acre lake took turns sounding off on the project’s potential environmental and economic costs during a public Texas Water Development Board meeting in Arlington Monday afternoon. The agency, tasked with managing the state’s water supply, convened the discussion to share the findings of its “feasibility review” for the project, hoping to hammer home its necessity and allay concerns about its consequences.
“As a community leader and elected official, I understand the importance of casting a long term vision and helping prepare our communities for the future,” state Rep. Gary VanDeaver, a New Boston Republican, wrote in a statement read aloud by another attendee. “In addition to being costly, it is unnecessary. There are countless solutions to the DFW area’s water needs.”
North Texas water planners first conceived of Marvin Nichols in the late 1960s. Tensions surrounding its future intensified in the 2000s , as Dallas-Fort Worth’s surging population laid bare the long-term inadequacies of its water supply.
State officials extol the project, slated for completion by 2050, as a sensible and formidable solution to future supply shortages. The Texas Legislature in 2007 deemed it a “site of unique value for the construction of a reservoir,” given the ample surface water provided by the Sulfur River basin and the comparatively low estimated costs of shipping the water to consumers.
The massive man-made pool would submerge portions of Red River, Titus, and Franklin counties. Completing the $7 billion undertaking would require damming the Sulfur River and flooding more than 100 square miles of forest, pasture, and wetland near Cuthand, a ranching community of roughly 300 about 35 miles southeast of Paris.
An unlikely coalition of wildlife conservationists, loggers, and generational ranchers, united under the banner “Preserve Northeast Texas,” views Marvin Nichols as a needlessly destructive boondoggle, designed not to meet the region’s basic needs but to feed the gluttony of water-hungry lawns in sprawling suburban subdivisions. Any potential benefits, they reason, wouldn’t be worth the costs: seizing tens of thousands of acres of private land, drowning a diverse and vibrant ecosystem, and disrupting the livelihoods of locals.
“It’s too damaging, and there are too many other ways to do it,” said Jim Thompson, the chair of the Region D planning group, which encompasses the site and its surrounding localities. “It may be less lucrative to improve infrastructure, but by the same token, it’s far less costly on our region.”
Thompson and his team superintend water supplies across 19 counties in northeast Texas, including Red River, Titus, and Franklin. They’ve long resisted the reservoir, putting them at odds with Region C’s planning body, the subgroup responsible overseeing the Metroplex’s aquatic resources .
The opposition compelled state lawmakers last fall to require the Texas Water Development Board to conduct a “feasibility review” of the project before pushing it forward.
The agency published its preliminary findings this month and painted an unequivocal picture: North Texas needs Marvin Nichols, and there are no insurmountable barriers — financial, logistical, or ecological — that make its completion infeasible.
Simone Kiel, a representative of civil engineering firm Freese & Nichols — whose early 20th century partner is the reservoir’s namesake — presented the review’s core findings Monday. She flooded development board officials and a skeptical audience of landowners, businessowners and preservationists with maps and tables forecasting the project’s impact.
Newly constructed reservoirs — Marvin Nichols among them — will make up just under 20% of northeast Texas’ water supply by 2070, she explained.
The agency’s latest analyses of the project estimate that its adverse economic and environmental effects would be minimal. The lake would submerge only 0.031% of the region’s prime farmland, Kiel said, eliciting scoffs from the crowd; it would swallow 7.7% of timber resources in the three counties. The decades of construction would pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the economy, she continued.
The agency has yet to fully assess the reservoir’s cultural or ecological impacts. Of the 13% it has surveyed for cultural artifacts, it identified 63 archaeological sites and one cemetery. The three counties straddled by the lake also house at least a handful of endangered animals.
A long roster of Marvin Nichols critics and cynics took to the microphone next. They cast doubt on the agency’s new statistics, and laid into its officials for not taking the time or care to register the concerns of citizens.
“Reservoirs are an archaic and outdated practice,” said Evan Purviance, a fifth generation Cuthand rancher who made the roughly 2.5 hour drive to Arlington to share his two cents. “While mine are being emptied, whose pockets are being lined?”
Purviance and his allies stressed the Metroplex could do much more to conserve its existing water supplies instead of pouring billions more into securing new ones.
“The wider environment is the commons of the people and the loss of diversity, deforestation and habitat affects us all,” said Anne Tindell, a resident of Nacogdoches, a city three hours south of Cuthand. “The easiest way to have more water is not to waste it in the first place. Water policies of the past are not the solutions for our future.”
For many, the sentimental cost of Marvin Nichols would also be too much to bear.
“This will take my father’s side of the family’s land, my mother’s side of the land. We will lose every acre that has been in both families for generations,” said David Eldrige, a man with a hefty drawl and jean overalls whose family has owned property near the banks of the Sulfur River for decades. “There is no price that you could put on this land.”
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