Upshur County commissioners voted July 15 to join a proposed 16-county groundwater conservation district in East Texas, advancing a regional effort to regulate the large wells that Dallas-area planners and private investors want to drill over the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer.
The Northeast Texas Groundwater Conservation District would need approval from the Legislature in 2027. County leaders call it their main legal tool against a wave of proposals to pump East Texas groundwater and pipe it to faster-growing parts of the state. Without a district, Texas’s rule of capture lets landowners pump nearly without limit.
Upshur is the latest county to sign on. Smith and Harrison counties have voted to join, and Wood and Gregg commissioners agreed this month to work with the Sledge Law Group on drafting the enabling legislation, according to KLTV. Upshur’s participation is contingent on at least nine other counties joining.
“I don’t like billionaires that want to trap and sell water out of the Carrizo Springs aquifer, which is water I drink from, and it’s water you drink from,” Upshur County Judge Todd Tefteller said, “and hauling it off and selling it to people in Dallas.”
The concern is concrete. Dallas-Fort Worth water planners in the state’s Region C group have proposed drilling 90 high-capacity wells across Smith, Upshur and Wood counties to pump 25,000 acre-feet — roughly 8 billion gallons — of groundwater a year to North Texas, the Longview News-Journal reported, citing the Region C plan.
A parallel fight is already in court. Dallas investor Kyle Bass, through two companies funded by his firm Conservation Equity Management, filed a federal lawsuit July 7 in Tyler to lift a moratorium the Neches & Trinity Valleys Groundwater Conservation District placed on his plan to drill 43 wells and draw billions of gallons from the same aquifer. The district adopted the moratorium May 21.
The disputes trace to a 2025 land-buying push and a failed legislative fix. During a second special session last August, lawmakers tried and failed to pause large extraction projects while the state studied how fast the aquifer refills. With no new law, conservation districts remain the only bodies that can cap pumping.
The coalition needs at least 10 counties before the plan is viable, and the enabling bill cannot advance until the Legislature convenes in January 2027. The Neches & Trinity Valleys moratorium is set to expire in October, or whenever the district finishes rewriting its rules — whichever is later.