With Texans now facing both the aftermath of floods and a referendum that could release billions into new state water supplies\u00a0and flood control projects, experts told The Hill, the state faces a critical question: Can it make the necessary investments in time to keep the economic miracle growing \u2014 and can it do so without either getting washed away or sucking the environment dry?<\/p>\n
When it rains, it pours<\/p>\n
The July 4 deluge funneled through limestone canyons, swelling rivers that tore through the Hill Country west of Austin and San Antonio and killing at least 132, with more than 100 others still missing \u2014 a death toll that makes the floods among Texas\u2019s deadliest weather disasters of the last century.<\/p>\n
Nor was that the end. Last Sunday, parts of the Hill Country that flooded Independence Day weekend were hit again by rainfalls\u00a0that topped 10 inches<\/a>, leading local leaders to\u00a0call for mandatory evacuations<\/a>.<\/p>\n A man surveys damage left by a raging Guadalupe River, Friday, July 4, 2025, in Kerrville, Texas. (AP Photo\/Eric Gay)<\/p>\n But all this, experts say, was not enough to definitively break the grip of drought. Instead, they point to a new reality of chronic scarcity of water \u2014 punctuated, but not broken, by its sudden, terrifying abundance.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not a matter of \u2018if\u2019 there is another drought, but \u2018when,\u2019\u201d said Robert Mace, director of the Meadows Center at Texas State University, a regional mecca for the study of water. \u201cAnd the question is: Is that \u2018when\u2019 tomorrow? As soon as the rains stop, does the next drought start?\u201d<\/p>\n For Austin, at least, the prognosis for its water supply has become less \u201cscary,\u201d Mace noted. The equivalent of more than 17,000 Olympic-sized pools worth of water thundering into the reservoir on Lake Travis took it\u00a0from 41 percent full in April to 74 percent full by mid-July<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 inflows which have been\u00a0matched or exceeded<\/a>\u00a0on the city\u2019s other reservoirs.<\/p>\n But the rains, Mace noted, may have been less an end to the drought than a freak parentheses within it: a perfect storm of \u201cthree firehoses of moisture colliding over the Hill County\u201d amid a broader reality in which Texas is getting drier.<\/p>\n Even after the floods, reservoirs on the\u00a0San Antonio<\/a>\u00a0and Nueces rivers, critical for cities including San Antonio and\u00a0Corpus Christi<\/a>, remain\u00a0near historic lows<\/a>.<\/p>\n Water fights<\/p>\n On the eve of the floods, local attempts to stop the drawdown of Hill Country aquifers were stymied at the highest levels of the state.<\/p>\n In late June, Gov. Greg Abbott (R)\u00a0vetoed a bipartisan law<\/a>\u00a0that would have allowed a Central Texas water district above the rapidly depleting Hays-Trinity Aquifer to begin charging fees for groundwater withdrawals.<\/p>\n That veto came amid an array of water fights playing out across Texas, with a wave of\u00a0more than two-dozen new data centers<\/a>\u00a0planned for water-stressed parts of the state and\u00a0hundreds of thousands of new residents<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 on balance the most in the country \u2014 moving to the state each year.<\/p>\n On the one hand, the state is \u201clooking into the abyss,\u201d said Rice University environmental law professor Gabriel Collins. \u201cBut what you see next to us is a partially assembled jetpack \u2014 where with a bit of tinkering we can fly out of here,\u201d Collins said.<\/p>\n In the Hill Country region west of Austin, rivers are at their lowest levels \u201csince record keeping began over 100 years ago,\u201d Charlie Hickman, executive manager of engineering with the Guadalupe Blanco River Authority, told local station KXAN<\/a> last month. In May, the Edwards Aquifer, a key source of water for San Antonio, dropped to its lowest level since the 1950s \u2014 driving local regulators to cut permitted pumping by\u00a0nearly half<\/a>.<\/p>\n FILE \u2013 A horse is seen grazing in a field on February 24, 2023 in Quemado, Texas. Agriculture and livelihood along the Rio Grande has undergone severe drought conditions with record-high dry spells straining the region. (Photo by Brandon Bell\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n Driving this dynamic is, above all, a planet heated up by the uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels, which has created a hotter, thirstier atmosphere that sucks moisture from the land, and increasingly replaces soaking rains \u2014 which replenish soil and aquifers \u2014 with torrential storms that run right off them.<\/p>\n Climate change has plunged the state into a new reality, said Mace. In the past when a drought ended, he said, \u201cYou could say, \u2018Woohoo, it\u2019s over. We\u2019re not gonna have to do that again.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n But now, less than a decade after the worst drought in the region\u2019s history, \u201chere we are back in it.\u201d Mace said that \u201cthis is probably the new normal going forward: that we keep experiencing droughts worse than the previous drought.\u201d<\/p>\n The downstream effects are playing out in legal battles across Texas, including lawsuits in Bryan-College Station and East Texas over aquifer pumping rights.<\/p>\n In the near term at least, that reality means shortage and conflict \u2014 at least regionally. In April, a private water supplier announced it was<\/a> cutting off supplies to nine planned developments in Central Texas; in June, a municipality west of Austin considered banning bulk sales of water<\/a>, a key lifeline to exurban residents whose wells have gone dry. In Montgomery County in East Texas \u2014 one of the 10 fastest-growing regions in the country \u2014 the cities of Magnolia and Conroe have halted the permitting of new commercial or residential wells.<\/p>\n \u2018So anxious for my cities\u2019<\/p>\n The downstream effects of shortages are playing out between cities as well. Last week, the city of Bryan-College Station \u2014 home of Texas A&M University \u2014 settled a lawsuit<\/a>\u00a0over a permit its groundwater authority had given to a landowner selling water from the aquifer to a rapidly growing suburb of Austin. Similar legal fights are playing out<\/a>\u00a0in Houston County and the city of Jacksonville<\/a>, in East Texas.<\/p>\n Making the picture more difficult for cities is a 2023 state law<\/a>\u00a0that makes it easier for residents \u2014 or developers of subdivisions or data centers \u2014 to remove themselves from a city\u2019s jurisdiction and tax base.<\/p>\n That law could allow developers of data centers or real estate to effectively secede from city\u00a0authority, allowing them to drill their own wells into the city water supply, without the city being able to charge them taxes or impact fees.<\/p>\n While cities have the potential to get ahead of that problem by signing preemptive development agreements with new entrants \u2014 effectively getting them to help fund the new civic water infrastructure they need \u2014 the prospect of the new rush \u201cmakes me so anxious for my cities,\u201d environmental lawyer Toni Rask said.<\/p>\n Most of the cities and water districts she represents, Rask said, \u201care just tiny, and it\u2019s easy for them to get pushed around by big, fancy tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n Members of Task Force 1 deploy boats along the Guadalupe River in the wake of a destructive flooding event in Kerrville on Friday July 4, 2025. (Christopher Lee\/The San Antonio Express-News via AP)<\/p>\n Floods mark the other extreme of development risk, as worsening rains meet a largely uninsured populace \u2014 raising the risk of\u00a0financial death spirals<\/a>, as totaled mortgages cut into the financial health of municipalities, which largely rely on property taxes for their financial lifeblood. The Independence Day floods brought at least $22 billion in property damage \u2014 losses that were largely uninsured, leading to risk of foreclosure and stark drops in the revenues of towns such as Kerrville.<\/p>\n After the floods, \u201cit\u2019s hard to imagine how fundamentally altered these communities are going to be,\u201d said Jayson O\u2019Neill, who studies climate at the Focal Point Strategy Group. For small Central Texas towns where most residents are on the hook for damages, \u201cyou just lost your entire property tax base. There\u2019s no value there anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n Only\u00a01 to 2 percent<\/a>\u00a0of inland Texans have flood coverage \u2014 with permissive building codes that have allowed\u00a05 million state residents<\/a>\u00a0to build their homes in floodplains. The state even allows citizens to build their homes in floodways \u2014 land immediately adjacent to a watercourse \u2014 leaving it up to municipalities to set stricter limits.<\/p>\n Many may not be aware they are at flood risk \u2014 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) flood maps are both\u00a0outdated<\/a>\u00a0and incomplete, with large swaths of Texas, including many flood prone areas,\u00a0with no flood data at all<\/a>.<\/p>\n Property owners can also challenge FEMA to have their properties removed from maps, which relieves them from the responsibility of buying federally subsidized flood insurance \u2014 as did\u00a0the owners of Camp Mystic<\/a>, the girl\u2019s camp where 27 died when the Guadalupe River spilled its banks.<\/p>\n Voters get a say this November<\/p>\n When it comes to water scarcity, rather than flood, Texas has taken some action. Like most experts interviewed by The Hill, Rice University\u2019s Collins argued that while Texas towns and cities have to wake up to a new reality of drought, the state is far from running out of water \u2014 and notes that it may be about to get a huge infusion of new resources.<\/p>\n In November, voters will get a chance to approve a referendum advocates have billed as a generational investment in water infrastructure that would unlock a $20 billion public investment in new water supplies, conservation and recycling.<\/p>\n Once federal, local and corporate investments are added in, that\u2019s a \u201cmeaningful bite\u201d of the approximately $154 billion the state needs to safeguard its water supplies, said Jeremy Mazur of Texas 2036, a nonpartisan think tank focused on the state\u2019s long-term future.<\/p>\n This year, Mazur said, \u201cthe legislature recognized that the water supply issue access is one of the more substantive policy issues informing the continuation of the Texas economic miracle.\u201d<\/p>\n FILE \u2013 The exterior of the Texas State Capitol on February 18, 2023 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Brandon Bell\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n The bill enabling the referendum wasn\u2019t unanimously popular in the legislature \u2014 conservative advocacy group Texans for Fiscal Responsibility\u00a0urged<\/a>\u00a0members to vote \u201cno,\u201d warning that it represented a new, permanent expense that risks \u201cgrowing government bureaucracy without guaranteeing outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n A handful of members voted against it, including state Rep. Brian Harrison (R), who\u00a0argued<\/a>\u00a0that Texas\u2019s budget surplus should instead be spent on property tax cuts.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/77331e0aaaa8270a642afe8015c73e22.jpeg\"\/)
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