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High-Water Mark

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The Southerland Properties Inc. developers filed an application with the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission several years ago for the right to withdraw 350 acre-feet of water per year (about 114 million gallons) from the Guadalupe upstream of the Canyon Lake impoundment. The proposed use: irrigation of a golf course in a residential resort. Goynes's organization, along with a landowner group called the Guadalupe River Association and the Water Oriented Recreation District, are fighting the permit on several complicated technical fronts. The basic objection is that Guadalupe water is already overappropriated.

John Hohn, board member of the San Marcos River Foundation and the lawyer for TRPA, points to TNRCC guidelines that permits should be granted only if computer models estimate that 75 percent of the allotted water will be present in the streambed 75 percent of the time. Establishing hard data for stream flow is difficult in the feast-or-famine fluctuations of Texas rivers, but Hohn says the numbers just don't add up. "The water," he says, "is there less than 10 percent of the time."

Goynes sums up TRPA's position in his summer 2001 newsletter: "It is our opinion that we simply cannot afford to use any more water from the rivers of central Texas for the irrigation of golf courses...It is possible to play golf on native grass or even on dirt...On the other hand, it is not possible to paddle a canoe through dirt."

The TNRCC has set an October hearing on the issue. It could deny the permit or grant it, which would lead to further litigation costs. But Goynes thinks the golf course application presents a good chance for TRPA to notch another win after years of failing to pass the kind of legislation that might have prevented the fight in the first place.

Perhaps, he thinks, the drought is ending. And as the storms pounding down on his campground attest, when it rains, it pours.

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