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Two recent editorials appearing in the Victoria Advocate—one by the Advocate editorial board and one by the Victoria Economic Development Corporation (VEDC)—highlight the disregard for Aransas County when making decisions involving large-scale water allocations from the Guadalupe River.
Both opinion pieces authored in Victoria County include repeated references to water in the Guadalupe River as “our water.” While acknowledging “the good folks of Aransas County” who also need this water, VEDC’s Mr. Fowler urges that “there are very few projects that will allow us to trade a portion of our water resource for such value.” The Victoria Advocate editorial board chimes in, “Let’s keep our water here.”
We have already seen that the Guadalupe River cannot sustain existing water commitments during periods of low-flow and deliver sufficient freshwater inflows to sustain our bays and estuaries. Yet the Victoria Advocate and Mr. Fowler urge Victoria Country to snap up this water for a proposed Exelon nuclear power plant that may never be built, before someone else does. This false choice between mortgaging the state’s water resources and economic development is precisely the type of race to the bottom that will harm both Victoria and Aransas County in the long run.
The hyper-localism urged by the Advocate and Mr. Fowler stands in stark contrast to the letter to the editor that ran the same day by Dr. Ron Outen, Regional Director of The Aransas Project. In his letter, Dr. Outen urged Victoria and its mayor, Will Armstrong, to make these important water decisions based on sound science and proper resource management. Outen explains that, “TAP’s position is that the river should be managed “top to bottom” for the benefit of all of Texas, including coastal communities.”
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