MARION COUNTY — Bob Sanders bumps along the dirt roads of his 1,100-acre ranch in a beat up burgundy Chevrolet Suburban, the engine roaring as his sprawling cattle operation, known locally for its wagyu beef, stretches around him. A shotgun rides in the passenger seat and battered binoculars sit on the dashboard.
The sloping pasture where his rust-colored cows graze gives way to trees that flank a narrow ribbon of water. It doesn’t look like much, just a slow-moving channel threading through sweetgums and cypress, but this 2.6-mile stretch of the Big Cypress Bayou carries a lot of weight — it connects Lake O’ the Pines, the region’s main water supply, to Caddo Lake, the state’s only natural lake.
Water feels abundant in this part of northeast Texas. But even in this lush corner of the state, water is increasingly top of mind. For Sanders and many of his neighbors in Marion County, about 35 miles northeast of Longview, the bayou represents something increasingly fragile in Texas: water that still belongs to the landscape it came from.
That was partly the reason why Sanders took a step few Texans have taken in decades. He donated part of his water rights to the Texas Water Trust, a little-known state program designed to preserve water for environmental and conservation purposes.
“That’s what I am trying to preserve, is water to keep this bayou system healthy. If North Texas gets our water, this ranch would be in a perpetual drought. It would break us and destroy the ranch,” he said.
Texas is staring at a water shortage by 2030 if a historic drought hits the state. As the population grows, droughts become longer and more frequent, and rising temperatures strain rivers and reservoirs, state water planners warn that without new water sources, Texas could face shortages in coming decades.
Lawmakers made significant investments last year in increasing water supplies, but that looming crisis has pushed growing cities to search for new supplies.
When a Dallas developer announced plans last year to drill more than 40 high-capacity wells in three East Texas counties to export billions of gallons of water from the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer in East Texas to water-stressed areas of the state, locals were outraged. They argued the proposal would be an “existential threat” to regional water supplies.
The local groundwater conservation district voided the developer’s permits after a poultry farm sued the district, then the developer also sued the district.
Even in this part of Texas where water appears plentiful, Sanders and his neighbors say the threat is personal and they are ready to protect the area’s water however they can.
“I have the right to water my cattle, family crops, but if this water is pumped into a tanker and transported, that’s a different deal, because it affects everybody around here,” he said.
What’s the Texas Water Trust?
Sanders’ decision to donate to the Texas Water Trust reflects a growing effort by some rural landowners to keep water in local ecosystems.
The program itself is not new. Created by the Texas Legislature in 1997 as part of the state’s broader Texas Water Bank program, the trust allows water rights holders to voluntarily dedicate their water to preserving the flows in rivers and streams, improving water quality and protecting fish and wildlife habitat.
Water rights can be placed in the trust temporarily or permanently, depending on the agreement.
In theory, the idea is simple: instead of diverting water for irrigation or other uses, the water stays in the river system.
In practice, it has rarely been used in nearly 30 years.
Only three water rights have been placed in the trust since its creation: Two on the Rio Grande and another tied to the San Marcos River in Central Texas. The first donation came in 2003, when Hudspeth County rancher Kit Bramblett placed more than 1,200 acre-feet of Rio Grande water into the trust after watching stretches of the river dry up.
Sanders’ donation is the first since 2006. He said his impetus was the historic Texas drought of 2011.
The little bit of rain that fell in a five-year span wasn’t enough to sustain the ranch, and the Sanders family feared that they might run out of grass to feed their cattle.
They began to explore alternative revenue streams to keep the ranch afloat as they watched many of their mature trees dry up and die. Sanders said the experience really opened his eyes to the fragility of the region’s water supply.
“Life is in the water. When a person has a stroke, sometimes you can rehab them,” Sanders said. “But when a tree is short of water and has a stroke, it doesn’t come back. It dies.”
Sanders wanted to take action to preserve the bayou, so he reached out to state agencies and organizations he had already done environmental work with, including the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, Caddo Lake Institute and the Army Corps of Engineers. He had worked with the organizations to improve water quality in the river and reintroduce native paddlefish following their decline after the construction of a dam.
Those agencies pointed him to The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit that helps preserve Texas land and water. The group agreed to buy a portion of Sanders’ water rights and place them into the state water trust.
Challenges to donation
Experts say the lack of participation in the water trust is largely due to how complicated and unfamiliar the process of donating water rights can feel to many who own them.
Surface water rights in Texas are treated as property rights and are governed by a patchwork of regulations rooted in a century-old doctrine often summarized as “first in time, first in right,” where the oldest rights have first right to water during shortages. Navigating that system can involve legal filings, state approvals and hydrological analysis that many landowners are unwilling or unable to pursue.
“There’s a lot of complexity around water rights,” said Myron Hess, a Texas water policy attorney who does some consulting work for environmental nonprofits. “Most people don’t understand that the water that’s in the river today isn’t necessarily going to be there tomorrow. Somebody else could take it out and pump it to Dallas.”
Awareness is another barrier.
“Not a lot of people are aware of [the trust],” said Marty Kelly, water resources program coordinator at Texas Parks and Wildlife.
In recent years, Parks and Wildlife, environmental groups and other state agencies held a workshop, gave presentations at water conferences and met with landowners to explain how the trust works and how Texans can participate.
Lawmakers also expanded Parks and Wildlife’s role in 2021, directing the agency to encourage and facilitate voluntary donations, help landowners navigate the process and to manage rights once they are placed in the trust. Kelly said the change gives the program clearer leadership.
“That’s a step in the right direction … There’s actually somebody who needs to be out trying to encourage people to put rights in the trust,” Hess said.
Concern about Caddo Lake
The 2011 drought forced many East Texas landowners to confront how vulnerable their operations could be to water shortages, said Ryan Smith, director of water and science for The Nature Conservancy in Texas. Another driver, he said, was Caddo Lake itself, which he described as “a very special place to everyone.”
Straddling the Texas-Louisiana border, the lake is famous for its maze of bald cypress trees rising from dark water. Several rivers and bayous feed the lake, including Big Cypress Bayou. Because the waterways are connected, the health of one can affect them all.
“We’re going to need to use all the tools in the toolbox to really find the balance,” Smith said. “Not just in this potential sale from the Cypress to the [DFW] metroplex, but in every case where water demand is growing.”
Back on his ranch, Sanders said the decision to put some of his water into the trust ultimately came down to legacy.
He’s nearing retirement and his son Dustin, who lives at the ranch with his wife and kids, now helps run the operation. Over the decades, the family has watched the land shift, with storms reshaping creek banks and droughts shrinking the bayou to a trickle some years.
What worries him most is the possibility that one day the water itself could be redirected out of the watershed or dry up completely.
He’s been talking to his neighbors about the trust. If enough of them decide to participate, Sanders believes it could help safeguard the rivers, the hardwood bottoms and ultimately Caddo Lake itself.
“It’s protection,” he said, “the bigger the army, the more protection you have.”
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