First the spring, then the creek and finally the well went dry. The family took to hauling water from wells near White Hall until those wells went dry too. Now the family was faced with driving 12 miles to Moody every day to get water and bring it back.
The water they hauled from Moody had to serve both the Aycocks and their livestock.
“You wouldn’t believe how much water a hot and thirsty cow can drink,” Aycock told attendees of the seventh annual Bell County Water Symposium on Thursday.
As for water conservation, he said the family took a bath every few days with five gallons of water.
“Yes,” he said. “I think water is important.”
Not long after that, part of the family ranch went to the government for the construction of Belton Lake.
“I still remember walking up the courthouse steps in Waco when we settled with the Brazos River Authority and the (U.S. Army) Corps of Engineers on the part of the ranch that they took,” he said.
“Would Central Texas look different without our reservoirs? My goodness, I can’t even imagine.
“Are there political consequences for the taking of land? Absolutely.”
Aycock delivered his reminisces and comments as part of a legislative update at Thursday’s symposium at the Central Texas Council of Governments building. He noted that 2,160 bills relating to water were filed in the last session of the Legislature.
The fate of future water bills in the Legislature will depend largely on who is chosen to head the Natural Resources Committee, he said. The committee chair has traditionally come from rural parts of the state but as Texas becomes more urban, the battle between rural and urban interests will intensify, he added.
“The committee chair has the power to move forward or kill legislation,” Aycock said. “Who chairs that committee and where they’re from will a huge impact on water policy, probably for the next several decades.”
Ron Kaiser, professor of water policy at Texas A&M University, preceded Aycock’s presentation with a presentation on regulations and recent trends in the state’s water policy. Even with a projected population of more than 40 million people by the year 2050, he said that the state has entered an era of conservation and intensive management of water, despite the Legislature authorizing and identifying sites where new dams can be built.
“The era when we built massive dams to hold water in this state is by and large over and we’re in a different kind of period now,” he said.
The traditional idea of water conservation has been to build dams to save the water for a rainy day, or rather a day when it doesn’t rain, he said. So much water was held back and the state had so many days when it didn’t rain that bays and estuaries along the coast suffered.
“As we allocated our surface water we forgot about the environment,” Kaiser said. “We forgot about leaving a certain amount of water in the rivers for fish and wildlife. We forgot about folks along the bays and estuaries and the commercial fishermen.
“The challenge is how do we go back and incorporate a certain base flow for the environment. That’s part of the challenge we face today.”
The symposium also included a presentation by Jason McAlister with the Blackland Research Center on the health of watersheds in Bell County and comments by Bell County Agricultural Extension Agent Dirk Aaron on water wise landscape design.
