Hill Country Water Summit Planned
Hill Country Water Summit Taps Leaders to Dissect Challenges and Plan Strategies
NEW BRAUNFELS, TEXAS — National and State leaders come together during the Texas Hill Country Summit Thursday, Dec. 8, 2016, at the New Braunfels Civic Center to dissect the state’s water challenges, plan strategies, and learn from two devastating holiday floods in the past two years on the Blanco, San Marcos and Guadalupe rivers.
Online registration can be completed at: http://www.guadalupebasincoalition.org/Default.aspx.
In addition to water and weather-related effects, the Summit offers an election re-cap and assessment and preview of the 85th Texas Legislature.
Participants also plan to explore the water management issues addressed in the distinctive white paper agreement forged between the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority (GBRA) and The Aransas Project (TAP) after years of litigation.
“This Summit promotes awareness of the precious water resources of the Texas Hill Country and facilitates planning strategies for short- and long-term challenges,” Todd Votteler, Ph.D., chairman of the Guadalupe Basin Coalition said.
Featured participants include leaders from;
- Texas Water Development Board (TWDB)
- Climatology Office at Texas A&M University
- National Weather Service (NWS)
- U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
- Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
- San Antonio Water System (SAWS)
- GBRA
- Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ)
- U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)
- TAP
- Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin
- Texas Alliance of Groundwater Districts
- Texas Senate and more.
“There are very few opportunities for the public, local officials, and students to find this level of water leadership assembled together to assess and help address the water situation we’re facing,” Votteler said, adding, “What better time to put water planning at the forefront. We want to be in a better position facing the spring rains of 2017 than we were in 2015 and 2016.”
GUADALUPE BASIN COALITION – GBC is a voluntary association of businesses, chambers of commerce, lake associations and governmental entities in counties along the Guadalupe River Basin (including all of its tributaries and springs) that are bonded by a common concern for the economic and environmental sustainability of the Guadalupe River Basin and San Antonio Bay.
GUADALUPE-BLANCO RIVER AUTHORITY – The GBRA was established by the Texas Legislature in 1933 as a water conservation and reclamation district. GBRA provides stewardship for the water resources in its 10-county statutory district, which begins near the headwaters of the Guadalupe and Blanco rivers, ends at San Antonio Bay, and includes Kendall, Comal, Hays, Caldwell, Guadalupe, Gonzales, DeWitt, Victoria, Calhoun, and Refugio counties.
This is yet one more meeting where the public will be bludgeoned by the idea that we should take water from east texas and send it to the cities further west, and to the arid lands of west texas.
The State of Texas is very seriously proposing a State Water Grid that would crisscross the state with water pipelines, transferring water from the eastern river basins and more plentiful aquifers, to places they consider more profitable uses for that water, whether the people whose own lives, own communities, depend on that water.
People are being told they need to get over this idea that the water under their communities, or under their land, is their water. There is a constant drumbeat of this idea of a unitary ownership of all the water in the State of Texas.
Your water is not your water, it is the property of the State, and the State will decide where it is used, and how it is used.