Senate Water Panel to Study Pecos Basin Decline, Red Bluff Governance and Produced-Water Reuse

The Texas Senate Committee on Water, Agriculture and Rural Affairs will gavel in at 9 a.m. Sept. 2 to take invited and public testimony on a single interim charge covering the Pecos River Basin: falling flows, the interstate compact that governs them, the 1930s special district that stores the water, and the treated oilfield wastewater that companies want to put into the river. Public testimony is limited to two minutes per witness, and anyone filing written testimony must bring 15 copies for the committee clerk and email a digital copy, according to a revised hearing notice. The Senate runs no online comment portal.

Sen. Charles Perry, R–Lubbock, chairs the seven-member committee — four Republicans and three Democrats — with Sen. Kevin Sparks, R–Midland, as vice chair, according to Texas Legislature Online. It is the panel’s second sitting in two days; members met Sept. 1 on the water demands of data centers. The Pecos charge turns to a basin that has spent most of a century in litigation, compact accounting and drought management.

The charge, Managing the Pecos River Basin, directs members to study water availability, flow decline and administrative challenges in the basin; to evaluate the purpose, operations and function of the Red Bluff Water Power Control District and its constituent irrigation districts; to review state accounting under the Pecos River Compact and the implementation of environmental flow standards; and to assess anticipated discharges and beneficial reuse of treated produced water. The recommendations it asks for are governance modernization, better interstate coordination and long-term basin reliability.

Red Bluff is the oldest piece of that machinery. The 43rd Legislature created the district in 1933, and the reservoir behind Red Bluff Dam has managed irrigation supply for seven member districts in Loving, Reeves, Ward and Pecos counties since the mid-1930s. Its statutory history runs through Chapter 9701 of the Special District Local Laws Code, which governs the $13.8 million the state paid the district and its members in 1991 out of the settlement in Texas v. New Mexico and confines that money to agricultural, irrigation and associated water quality projects in those four counties. Ninety years of accreted authority is what the charge means by modernizing special district governance.

Compact accounting is a standing state obligation. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality publishes an annual report calculating New Mexico’s delivery obligation to Texas under the Pecos River Compact; the agency’s most recent posted report covers accounting year 2024. Environmental flow standards run on a separate track, adopted by TCEQ under Section 11.1471 of the Water Code, the framework the Legislature built in 2007.

The newest element is the one with capital behind it. Permian Basin production generates close to a billion gallons of produced water a day, and disposal wells have raised underground pressure enough to trigger earthquakes and blowouts, The Texas Tribune and Inside Climate News reported Aug. 21. TCEQ has accepted applications to discharge treated produced water into rivers since 2024 and has issued none. Texas Pacific Water Resources filed that year to discharge into Salt Creek, a Pecos tributary, and this month opened a freeze-desalination plant near Orla in Reeves County able to treat 10,000 barrels — about 420,000 gallons — a day, recovering roughly half as usable water. Several other companies have applied to discharge into the Pecos watershed.

The Dispatch has tracked the same rollout from the oil and gas side. Senators heard regulators ask for clearer lines between agencies at an Aug. 11 Senate Natural Resources hearing on produced-water rules and monitoring, a sitting the Dispatch previewed the week before, and TCEQ has separately proposed rules that would allow treated oilfield wastewater to be applied to land. Perry’s committee now takes the subject up from the water side, in the basin where any river discharge would land.

Because this is an interim hearing, the committee will take no votes and no legislation is before it. What senators hear will shape the panel’s interim report and the water bills filed for the 90th Legislature, which convenes in January 2027.

Meeting at a glance

Committee members

• Sen. Charles Perry, R–Lubbock (SD-28) — Chair
• Sen. Kevin Sparks, R–Midland (SD-31) — Vice Chair
• Sen. César Blanco, D–El Paso (SD-29)
• Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D–San Antonio (SD-19)
• Sen. Adam Hinojosa, R–Corpus Christi (SD-27)
• Sen. Lois W. Kolkhorst, R–Brenham (SD-18)
• Sen. José Menéndez, D–San Antonio (SD-26)