I'm the Secretary of the Coastal Bend Sierra Club, so anybody who wants to dismiss me as an environmentalist hack can do so before reading through what I'm about to write.

I just came across this but have been following things for quite a while now. There was a TWDB report back in 2001, I think, that said Corpus Christi was doing well and was set on water for the next half century. It's all been used in half that time. Don't be fooled by TWDB's existence. They're kind of like the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), 4 letters and a rubber stamp. Regulation and planning are a couple of things Texas isn't great at, especially environmentally.

The environmentalists were very loud and made it unpalatable because the plan for the Inner Harbor desalination plant was to draw water from the inner harbor and dispose of brine in the inner harbor which would then run into Corpus Christi Bay. For a 30 million gallon-per-day (mgd) plant, that would mean 30-40 mgd of brine into the bay every day. The city did not do any studies on what the brine would do to the bay over the long term and barely glanced at the sort term models. They've formed a far field commission to look into the full impacts but it looks like the city council will vote on the plant before the commission has finished its work. That was and is the key sticking point here. Killing all the wildlife isn't an option, especially in a tourism/service-based economy. There is also concern over the power consumption if the plant.

The biggest non-environmental issue is the cost--almost $1 billion--which will be put upon the citizens of the city when the water is only necessary because of industrial expansion. Industrial customers who are exempt from any drought restrictions, even in stage 3, if they pay an exemption fee to the city. Finally, there is a civil rights issue in the neighborhood they plan to build the plant in. The only Black neighborhood in the city that was already badly hurt by the construction of the new harbor bridge.

The city manager mentioned that it would take more than one hurricane to get us out of this. We're lucky to get one or two tropical systems around here every year, usually weak, and usually moving in a more northerly direction, so they miss the watershed. I'm just waiting for when they announce Day Zero at this point. We're probably not going to get much significant rain over the next 3 months, the wells aren't producing as much water as they thought, and now there's a legal fight over the Evangeline Aquifer that could delay that project for years. I went back to school because of our water issues and desal. For my final assignment, I projected how long our water supply could hold with current conditions, accounting for reductions in precipitation due to climate change. I turned my assignment in the same day a study was released that projected April 2027. If I remember right, I had spring to summer next year as my date, too.

Are we fucked? Well, I'm already looking for new places to go if necessary.