06/02/2026
I drove to Austin yesterday with Kara...
We could have watched it from the office. The whole hearing on the 2027 State Water Plan was on Zoom, and honestly that would have been the easy thing to do. But there are some things you cannot get through a screen. We did not just want to hear it. We wanted to feel it. And we damn sure did.
We sat in that room with people who came from every corner of Texas, and one by one they stood up and told the truth about their water.
From East Texas, we heard from landowners who feel like the state is coming for their groundwater. People whose families have been on the same land for generations, being told the water beneath their feet belongs to a metro hours away. They talked about the rule of capture, the simple idea that if you own the land, you own the water under it, and how a law written to protect a rancher watering his herd is now being used to justify draining whole aquifers. One of them was a real estate agent like us, out of Tyler, who sells across those small towns along Interstate 20 and Interstate 30. She stood up and asked the board to do one thing: follow the law and protect the people who actually live there.
From South Texas, we heard from a community advocate on the Rio Grande, where water is not a future worry. It is already running out. Reservoirs at historic lows. More than a thousand colonias along the border, hundreds of thousands of people, for whom clean water is not a slide in a presentation. It is whether the tap runs tomorrow.
And from all over, we heard from people watching data centers go up all around them with no limit on how much water they can take. From the Panhandle to the Hill Country to Central Texas, neighbors describing the same thing: enormous facilities arriving almost overnight, no requirement to even disclose their water use, and a state water plan that does not account for a single drop of it.
One of the most powerful voices in the room was a woman named Annie. And the reason it landed so hard is that she is not an outsider lobbing stones. She helped build this industry. She spent six and a half years working for a company that builds AI data centers. She holds a patent in artificial intelligence. She is trained as a strategic futurist who literally studied the future of the internet, and today she works as a chief AI architect. She is also a sixth generation Texan whose family still holds 200 acres of the land they originally settled, a wife of 21 years, a mother of three kids in public school, and an elder at her church. In other words, she has every reason to want this industry to succeed, and deep roots in the soil it is drawing from.
And she stood up and said the plan does not add up. She told the board it was mind boggling that a 50 year water plan could leave data centers out entirely. She ran the math herself, and her estimate landed on an astronomical amount of water being pulled out of local Texas systems every year to feed these facilities, water that gets evaporated away or polluted in the process. Her point was simple and hard to argue with. She understands exactly how much water it takes to make the chips, raise the buildings, cool the hardware, and power the grid behind all of it, because she has been on the inside. And from the inside, she is telling us the truth is not in this plan.
When the person who built the thing is the one waving the red flag, you listen.
Here is what stayed with me most. There were a few other real estate agents in that room, people just like us, who came because our clients are the families buying and selling this land, and they deserve the truth about what is happening to the water under it.
And in all of it, not once did anyone reach for a political side. Nobody was red. Nobody was blue. We were farmers, ranchers, advocates, parents, agents, neighbors. People from every walk of life, all there for the one thing every single one of us needs to live.
Water.💧
That is the whole story. We are not divided on this. We just want water, for our families, our livestock, our crops, and our towns. The public comment window on this plan closes Friday at 5pm. If your heart is in this too, your voice belongs on the record.
From S.L
