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By David Bowser WHITE DEER, Texas — The Panhandle Ground Water Conservation District has postponed a vote on its new rules. The water district had set this week as a deadline for comments on new rules they have developed over the past 15 months. They had planned to vote on the rules next week, but following a public hearing on the rules in October, the board decided to postpone their deadline on comments and a vote on adopting the new rules. C.E. Williams, general manager of the district, says he expects the rules to be brought up for a vote before the end of the year, but he says landowners in the district still have some questions about them. "We have had a request by some people to meet with them to explain the new rules," Williams says. "We're having a difficult time getting a meeting scheduled." The main issue appears to revolve around depletion allowances and pumping permits in Roberts County, the one county in the seven-county district where ranchers are trying to sell their water. At a meeting in Miami, Texas, the county seat of Roberts County, Williams said he is looking for ideas as well as explaining the new rules and how they came about. "This isn't the only way in the world to do it," Williams said. "We asking for your help if you've got some ideas for a better approach to what we're trying to do." The proposed rule changes are the result of a number of actions in the district that the board did not anticipate when the last rules changes were made. "The bottom line is that back in 1998 when we put our management plan in place, we thought we needed to leave some water for future generations," Williams said. "That's where we started down this road." Over the past five years, more and more landowners have indicated they want to sell their water, putting more and more pressure on the near-finite resources of the Ogallala Aquifer. Williams said the board took the old high impact permit and divided it into two parts. A landowner can apply for the first part, an "Initial Ground Water Availability Permit," or IGAP, which would give the landowner an idea of how much water, according to district hydrology studies, he has under his property. That permit, in turn, can be sold or committed to a developer wanting to put together a tract of land with a given amount of water for sale. The developer would then apply for a second permit, an "Off-Site Permit," to pump and transport the water. The initial permit would be relatively easy to obtain, Williams continued, and the application could be completed in a day. The second permit would require more complex information and, in the past, this is the area that slowed down the permitting process. "There were questions in the high impact permit that probably did not relate directly to a landowner who simply wanted to sell his water," Williams explained. The new process should make it easier for a landowner to get a permit. The IGAP is only one page. Because of the expense of transporting the water out of the district, it is unlikely that any one landowner would have all the water a project might need. A major water project would require a lot of water and most likely involve several landowners. Williams said the landowners, unless they plan to transport the water themselves, should not be unnecessarily burdened by the water pumping and transportation permit. "We're not trying to set the price," Williams said. "We're not trying to tell anybody what to do. We're really trying to help market the water." The developer would have to work out well spacing and get a conservation plan from the end user and meet other requirements that were in the old high production process under the old rules. "All that is contained in the Off-Site permitting process," Williams said. Williams estimates that the Off-Site permitting process will likely take 30 to 45 days. Landowners who already have high impact permits, Williams said, won't have to go through any more permitting processes. The underlying goal of the new rules, he noted, is what has become known as the 50-50 rule. The district and the regional water planning group have set a goal of conserving for the next 50 years 50 percent of the water that was in the ground in 1998, when the 50-50 goal was first developed. "There's been a lot of controversy on how we're going to meet the 50-50 goal," Williams said. "We thought the appropriate way to approach that would be to allow one percent per year." He said, however, that a public hearing in October revealed a potential a problem with that. "We’ve done some changing," Williams said. "We think maybe we can do some kind of weighted average or something for the whole project area and still meet our goal." The one percent, he explained, would be calculated on a three-year rolling average. "There are drier years and wetter years in the Texas Panhandle," he noted. "The three-year rolling average is designed to take into consideration some of the peaks and some of the valleys." Williams said the district went to the one percent usage concept because of a concern over who the end user might be once a project is put together, and whether they will actually stop once the 50 percent goal is reached. Williams said the district concluded that spreading out the use of the water would be better for the end user and the aquifer over time. "That was the thought process over putting the one percent in," Williams said. "It gave a better decline over time." T. Boone Pickens, a Dallas businessman and Roberts County rancher who organized Mesa Water Inc., for the purpose of selling ground water, said he'd rather have the determinations made between the buyer and seller. Pickens said he doesn't want to be limited to one percent a year, but he's willing to abide by the 50 percent rule. "I might want to take my 50 percent in 25 years," Pickens explained. He said that once he's withdrawn 50 percent of the water, he'd shut down. "I've agreed to that," he added. Pickens and others who have joined him in Mesa Water Inc. already have high impact pumping permits that initially allowed them to pump one acre-foot per year for each acre of water rights they hold. The one percent rule could prevent some of the Mesa landowners from realizing the one acre-foot level, though Williams said it reflects more readily the amount of water in the saturated sands of the aquifer beneath a given property. "It's very, very frustrating," Pickens said of the proposed changes in the rules. |
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