BORDERING ON EMPTY
THREE YEARS into one of the most extreme droughts in Texas history, Raymondville City Manager Eleazar “Yogi” Garcia was facing a worst-case scenario. It was February 2013, still technically winter in Raymondville, a humble border city of 11,000 about 30 miles north of the Rio Grande, and the two giant border reservoirs — Amistad and Falcon — were only about a third full. For months, farmers in the Rio Grande Valley had been calling elected officials in Texas and Washington, D.C., demanding that they force Mexico to release water it owed Texas under treaty obligations. Now, the consequences of a parched river were coming to bear on little Raymondville: Garcia had just received a letter from the city’s water provider stating that it could run out of water in 60 days. It was the first time in the 22 years Garcia had been city manager that he was faced with the prospect of empty taps and tubs.
The situation required drastic action. Garcia switched the city from stage 1 voluntary conservation to stage 3 for severe water shortage conditions, shutting down fountains and ornamental ponds, emptying swimming pools and limiting when residents could water their lawns. But conservation alone wasn’t going to save the city. On paper, Raymondville had plenty of Rio Grande water to serve its population; the real trouble lay in moving it north through 56 miles of canals and pipes to the city’s water treatment plant.
“It didn’t matter what kind of rights I had at the river,” Garcia said. “I couldn’t get the water here.”
Like most cities in the Valley, Raymondville buys water from one of about two dozen irrigation districts, which hold the rights to pump and sell water from the Rio Grande. The districts were created in the early 1900s, when farmers began experimenting with growing rice, sugarcane and citrus in the semi-tropical Brownsville area, southeast of Raymondville, where the Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Over time, the farmers dug hundreds of miles of earthen canals to move the river’s bounty inland. The canals leaked from the beginning. Though the districts have spent millions upgrading the system — lining some canals and replacing others with pipelines — the canals lose, on average, 41 percent of the water to leakage and evaporation.
In Raymondville’s case, Delta Lake Irrigation District, the largest district in the Valley, is contractually responsible for delivering about 5,670 acre-feet — enough water to fill about 2,800 Olympic swimming pools — to the city every year. In wet times, the system
