On Aug. 24, 2026, Director of Infrastructure and Natural Resources Policy Jeremy Mazur testified before the House Committee on Natural Resources on the findings from his report on the Coastal Bend water crisis and recommendations to improve the state and regional water plan process.
The following is a written version of the testimony.
Good afternoon Mr. Chairman, Vice-Chair, and members of the committee. I am Jeremy Mazur, Director of Infrastructure & Natural Resources Policy for Texas 2036.
Earlier this year, both the state’s water plans, and the planning process, were put to the test when a genuine water crisis emerged in the Coastal Bend, with Corpus Christi at the heart of the unfolding disaster.
As this crisis grew, and attracted national headlines, Texas 2036 began researching whether the state’s water plans ever warned that the water crisis in the Coastal Bend would happen. We looked specifically at the data and recommendations within each state and regional water plan to see if they provided sufficient warning.
In short, they did not.
First, across twenty-five years and five planning cycles, not one state or regional water plan ever projected that Corpus Christi would run short of water during the 2020s for its own municipal needs.
The same was true for Alice, Beeville, Rockport, Portland, Ingleside, Mathis and the other communities at the center of this crisis. In fact, the water supply plans for many of these cities said “no shortages are projected” across every planning cycle.
The very plans meant to warn these cities of potential drought-induced shortages never identified the problem.
Second, at the regional level, the plans from each planning cycle did not consistently indicate that the Coastal Bend – as a region – would face a water supply shortage during the 2020s.
Some plans projected a water surplus for the Coastal Bend in the 2020s. Others projected a water shortage, only to have the next set of plans indicate that there would be a surplus.
Consequently, a community reading these plans in sequence had no stable warning signal to act on.
The plans did flag shortages for some individual water user groups. But those shortages were mostly groundwater or treatment plant limits, and they came and went from one cycle to the next: a large projected shortage in one plan, none in the next.
Lastly, we found that the plans from each cycle recommended a different mix of water management strategies for the 2020s. Some to address local water shortages, others as a planning cushion against uncertain growth or implementation risk.
If the plans were meant to be a blueprint for developing water management strategies, they never settled on what that blueprint should contain.
Together, these findings point to a bigger conclusion: the plans did not foresee the crisis that happened and didn’t create the urgency to build water supply projects. Of the 50 strategies the last plan recommended for this decade, only one had been built by the time the crisis hit — a desalination plant in Alice.
Mr. Chairman, this does not mean Texas should abandon water planning.
To the contrary, Texas must have a state water plan. The regional process established by SB 1 is the correct foundation, and remains our best, most logical approach.
And to be clear: TWDB and regional planners followed the law as established by SB 1 when developing these water plans.
Thanks to Proposition 4, Texas is about to make historic investments in water infrastructure. The state water plan will guide those investments. The Legislature has an opportunity this session to revisit SB 1 and apply the lessons learned from the Coastal Bend.
Our report — included in the Committee’s Dropbox — includes several recommendations here.
First, build in a phase to update the models, data, and science behind the plans, and consider a longer planning cycle so there’s time to make appropriations for those updates.
Second, replace the menu of water management strategies with an actionable implementation framework, organized by purpose and urgency, with start dates and completion milestones for project delivery.
Third, plans should stress-test for droughts worse than a drought of record.
And finally, among the other recommendations, the plans need to do a better job of tracking implementation progress over time.
These recommendations are based on our report’s observations of what happened in the Coastal Bend. And we offer them in the spirit of making the water plan, and the state’s planning process better.
Thank you for your time, and I welcome any questions that you may have.
