Water is one of many issues at the forefront of Texas politics this election cycle, no place more so than in Corpus Christi. 

Texas’ sparkling city by the sea has received national attention in recent months over ever-worsening conditions for residents deluged by years of drought restrictions. Predictions of an impending water emergency have been pushed back month by month thanks in part to some timely rains, but still remain within arm’s reach. Governor Greg Abbott previously indicated a state takeover of the city may be necessary to handle its water woes. 

Local leaders have faced intense scrutiny over their perceived lack of foresight to get ahead of the crisis and more recently, a lack of sufficient action coupled with controversial policies allowing industrial plants and factories to use large sums of water amid drought restrictions in exchange for a monthly fee.

Now, the race for Texas House District 34, which includes half of Corpus, could in some ways serve as a referendum on the region’s water crisis and even help shape the future direction of its water policy. Once a relatively safe blue seat, incumbent state Representative Able Herrero opted not to run again in 2024, and Republican Denise Villalobos, a former local school board trustee and oil and gas project manager, flipped the seat by a margin of over 10 points—marking a notable down-ballot extension of the Trump-fueled wave among South Texas Latino voters. Trump won the district by 2 points. 

The last time a Republican held that seat was when Connie Scott, now the Nueces County judge, ousted Herrero in the tea-party wave of 2010 but only held onto the seat for one term. 

While she won in a red wave, Villalobos now faces reelection in a potential blue wave season and will face Democratic challenger Stephanie Guerrero Sáenz at the ballot box in November. 

It’s a top race for state Democrats this election cycle, one of the highest priority targets in their effort to expand their numbers or even take control of the Texas House. Per the latest census data, about three-quarters of the district’s constituents are Hispanic. Now, that could be changing as polling data suggests Latino voters who voted for Trump and other down-ballot GOP candidates in 2024 are swinging the other direction. 

“If Democrats are going to take back the Texas House, they have to flip seats like this,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “This is a heavily Latino seat, and the trends for Democrats have been moving in a favorable direction.”

(Photos courtesy of Villalobos, Guerrero Saenz campaigns, Texas Legislative Council; Illustration by Texas Observer staff)

The Texas GOP is also working hard to defend vulnerable incumbents like Villalobos. In 2024, Republicans poured more than $1 million into Villalobos’ campaign, funded largely with contributions from GOP and business interest groups, including $200,000 from Texans for Lawsuit Reform (TLR) and $255,000 from Governor Greg Abbott’s war chest.

This cycle, Villalobos has raised just over $200,000, as of the latest campaign finance records released in July, which includes $15,000 from TLR, $5,500 from the Texas Oil & Gas Association PAC, and $5,000 from the Koch Industries PAC, whose company operates a refinery in Corpus Christi. 

That haul is so far more than double Guerrero Sáenz’s nearly $85,000 in fundraising. 

Guerrero Sáenz’s campaign is buoyed largely by Democratic groups. The House Democratic Campaign Committee has given her camp $25,000 and a Democratic aligned PAC, the Lone Star Project, gave $15,000.

Rottinghaus said an urgent issue like Corpus’ water crisis could shake up the county’s traditionally conservative and industry-centric lean. “The water variable could scramble the normal partisan calculation. … Villalobos had a pretty healthy margin [in 2024], but this is a district that’s otherwise pretty close,” Rottinghaus said, noting that Trump won by just a couple points while Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke won it by around 15 points in 2018. 

Predictably, both candidates have made water a pillar of their campaign platforms ahead of the 2027 legislative session. 

Villalobos’ campaign website highlights her efforts on water in the 89th legislative session, including $46 million in state support she says she helped secure for water-related projects, but lacks any additional information on future efforts or policy plans addressing water in the upcoming session. At the height of the water crisis, the state representative said that she plans to file major legislation aimed at reforming the state water system and addressing her district’s issues, including proposals to centralize control of local water supply infrastructure. “There’s so many different water entities and no one is actually taking the lead,” she told the local TV station KRIS in March. “There needs to be someone that says, nope, A, B, C, D absolutely needs to happen within the next 10 years or we won’t be on track for whatever this future Texas economy looks like. And that does not exist today.” She has also worked to end the state-mandated release of water from local reservoirs into the Nueces Estuary. 

Villalobos’ campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment and expansion on her potential proposed water policies. 

Guerrero Sáenz, a former public school teacher, initially agreed to an interview on her plans for water policy, but did not respond to repeated attempts to schedule the interview nor requests for comment via email. Her website includes a section entitled “Protecting Our Water and Natural Resources,” which states in part: “Stephanie believes economic growth and environmental stewardship go hand in hand. She supports investments in water security, resilient infrastructure, and innovative energy solutions that create jobs while protecting the bays, waterways, and natural resources that make the Coastal Bend unique.” 

The key debate among stakeholders is over how the region balances water use between industrial users, including the region’s numerous petrochemical refineries, and residential users. Industry accounts for more than half of the city’s daily water use, with just three refineries and one plastics complex accounting for 40 percent of the city’s annual water use in 2025. Residents account for about a third of the city’s use, and their consumption is on the decline, while industrial use is on the rise, according to Corpus Christi Water. According to city data, commercial, large volume, and wholesale water sales account for roughly 88 percent of total water consumption.

Bob Paulison, executive director of the Coastal Bend Industry Association, which represents the largest industrial water users in the Corpus Christi region, says much of that use is carefully calculated. “The industry approach to this has always been to be efficient and careful users of water, and help support the city,” Paulison said in an interview. “They realize that they’re a big user, a big proportion of the water supply, and so … they’re continually evaluating the best management practices to use.” 

Plants and factories surround Corpus Christi Bay and the Coastal Bend, consuming large amounts of freshwater. (Photo by Justin Doud)

Local activists disagree.

“During these drought conditions, residents and small businesses, who are all facing rising costs and stagnant wages, were required to conserve or face fines and surcharges for misuse, while the city allows exempted industrial users to avoid drought surcharges and even some conservation requirements,” said Chloe Torres, the Coastal Bend regional coordinator for the Texas Campaign for the Environment. “Fundamentally, that’s unfair.”

The City of Corpus Christi allows large volume industrial users to pay a voluntary “Drought Surcharge Exemption Fee,” which exempts them from additional fees for water use when certain drought conditions occur. For the city’s largest industrial customer, which uses around 12.5 million gallons of water per day, that adds up to just over $116,000 a month. A report by Inside Climate News recently revealed that residents have unknowingly footed the bill for industrial water use for years after the city miscalculated rates.

In the absence of state legislation limiting industrial use or mandating an equitable structure for fees, environmental advocacy groups like For The Greater Good, the Texas Campaign for the Environment, and CHISPA Texas joined together to propose what they call the Fair Water Amendment, which would change city code to remove the surcharge exemption option for industrial and wholesale users and require everyone to adhere to the same restrictions and economic penalties facing residential users. 

“[Current policy] absolutely limits our ability to grow,” Elida Castillo, CHISPA Texas program director, said of the impact tax and fee exemptions can have. “Our communities cannot pay for all of [their] infrastructure up front, and priority [for state and federal support often] goes to the bigger cities.”

The water amendment received over 12,000 signatures of support, surpassing the minimum required for the amendment to get on the ballot, which only adds to the importance of water policy in the November elections. 

Industry representatives have cautioned against calls amid the crisis to install restrictive new policies on industry. “We know that we live on the edge of a desert in a semi-arid location that is prone to droughts, and for the last 100 years we’ve been able to manage to keep the appropriate balance,” Paulison, of the local industry association, said. “We think that that’s entirely possible going forward, and we think that people that are advocating for arbitrary restrictions and limitations are just misguided.”

While a similar state-level policy seems unlikely in the near future, advocacy groups hope other efforts are made as additional approaches are proposed, like the construction of desalination plants in the region. In the event those controversial projects move forward, the groups are calling on state legislators to ensure environmental precautions are taken, including salination studies in the bay and estuaries that would be impacted and studies on the impact the plants could have on local communities. Such concerns led a heavily hyped project, the Inner Harbor Desalination Plant, to be voted down by city council, though other plants are in planning stages for the near future, and the Inner Harbor plant is now being reconsidered. 

Supporters of those projects, including the Texas Water Infrastructure Network, an industry group that advocates for businesses involved in water infrastructure, say they provide critical stability without having to pray for rain. “Corpus got a get out of jail free card with the weather, but they could easily be back there in a year. They may not have that luxury in the future,” Perry Fowler, the group’s executive director, told the Observer.

At the state level, the nonpartisan policy research group Texas 2036 found in a new report that the state’s decades of water plans failed to predict any impending crisis in the Coastal Bend, and called for revisions to how the state drafts predictions and water policy.

“A planning process that could not see the Coastal Bend water crisis coming should not, unchanged, direct that investment,” wrote Jeremy Mazur, Texas 2036’s Director of Natural Resources & Infrastructure Policy.

The situation facing Corpus is not unique for a city like it in Texas, but its severity and immediacy stands apart.

Water remains at the top of constituents’ minds. Isabel Araiza, For The Greater Good’s cofounder and director, said that since the group was founded back in 2016, residents have gone from reading pamphlets on “desal” and assuming it referred to diesel gas to becoming vocal stakeholders in the future of their communities. Now, she says that Corpus area voters have become much more attuned to the ins and outs—and urgency—of water policy.

The post One of the Top Texas House Races Could Come Down to a Single Issue: Water appeared first on The Texas Observer.

This spring, a Permian Basin pastor got an unpleasant surprise: a geyser of more than 1.5 million gallons of toxic brine gushing up through the parking lot of the First Baptist Church in Grandfalls. It was a “zombie well”—what happens when the plug on one of the state’s hundreds of thousands of old wells fails, releasing poisonous gas and water onto the property above.

These blowouts are dangerous in themselves. The gas that comes up can be poisonous enough to kill, as it did an oilfield worker and his wife in Odessa in 2019. The water carries benzene and xylene, which cause cancer and wreck the hormonal and reproductive systems of humans and animals. When it comes from injected wastewater, it can also carry a secretive mix of synthetic chemicals, including the “forever chemicals” known as PFAS.

But the spills are only the visible part of the problem. Every oil and gas well, once drilled, is a hazard someone has to keep sealed forever. And Texas has a lot of wells.

Earlier this year, two articles—one of them my own in the Barbed Wire and another in the Texas Observer—uncovered the story of a subdivision and elementary school south of Fort Worth built on an old landfarm, a field where drilling waste from the fracking boom had been spread across the soil. Parents at the school alleged that their children had developed strange health complaints, though after our reporting, the developer released results from testing it had commissioned that found the ground was clean.

I’ve been writing about the toll the oil and gas industry takes on its neighbors since the early days of the fracking boom, when I covered a North Texas family sickened by a shale gas well placed on their land without their consent and (for the Observer) another family on the Keystone XL route left for years with a lake of raw sewage in their front yard. That work taught me that, for many oil and gas operators, dumping their waste on their neighbors—trash that otherwise they would have to pay to prevent or clean up—is simply standard business practice. 

Today, I run Future Heist, a watchdog group that focuses on threats to Texas land and water and the communities moving against them. The Fort Worth-area landfarm—which happened to be in a county with a history of grievous environmental contamination and a local government unusually committed to investigating it—looked to me like one visible trace of something much larger. During the Barnett Shale fracking boom of the 2000s and early 2010s, oil and gas exploration companies, working at a frenzied pace with minimal regulation or oversight, drilled some 21,000 wells around the Metroplex, each producing thousands of tons of solid waste. That waste had to go somewhere, and it was often spread on farmland surrounding drilling areas—the kind of areas now turning into suburbs. 

Unfortunately, Texas keeps no public record of where that waste ended up. So my colleague, Greg Randall, and I looked at what the state does track: the wells themselves. And, in particular, which wells were at the greatest risk of going zombie.

Over months, we built a map that turns the state’s scattered and impenetrable records into something a normal person can actually use: a way to look up what lies beneath your own address.

(Future Heist, screenshot)

The Railroad Commission has around 1.2 million wells on its books, some 300,000 of them plugged. From those records we built a profile of the ones most likely to fail. Many things can turn a plugged well into a zombie, and the first is the plug itself.

The wells are sealed with cement, but cement does not stay sealed. Blake Scott, an oilfield-waste specialist who spent decades in the industry, told me the physics is not in doubt: Whether underground or on the surface, cement will eventually fail. “We’re betting that plug is going to last forever, when we know damn good and well it’s going to crack,” he told me. 

Once a well is sealed, Scott added, the oil and gas industry, “likes to talk like it’s sealed forever. No, it’s not.” His challenge to anyone who assumes an underground plug lasts forever: Walk out to your nearest driveway and count the cracks.

But even that assumes the plug was any good to begin with. The American Petroleum Institute issued its final plugging guidance only in 2019, so the wells failing now were sealed under much older rules. 

Nor is the work always done by anyone with reason to do it well. Old wells pass down to mom-and-pop operators or to the cash-poor subsidiaries that big companies spin off so they can quietly declare bankruptcy. Hawk Dunlap, a well-control specialist who ran for the Railroad Commission this year, has put the problem simply: “No one likes to pay for a funeral.”

Then, there is the pressure pushing up on those plugs from below. A fracked well produces about four times as much highly salty and chemical-laden “produced water” as it does oil, and that wastewater is typically pumped back underground. 

The amounts of water pumped back underground are staggering. Katie Smye, a geoscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, has counted some 60 billion barrels injected into the Permian Basin, half of that since 2010—enough to fill Texas’ biggest lake, Toledo Bend, nearly twice over with toxic brine. So much wastewater has been pumped underground that in parts of West Texas, the ground has begun to bulge upward. All that pressurized fluid seeks a way out, and an old well is often the readiest one. In a 2024 study, researchers at SMU traced fluid that had moved roughly 12 miles underground before erupting from a plugged well—far outside the radius our own map treats as the danger zone around an injection site.

One such well caused the disaster at the Grandfalls church. How many more are inching toward their own catastrophe? Impossible to say, short of thousands of professionals walking the field and checking every one.

But our map shows which wells we calculate are at the highest risk. Our model weighs several factors, all drawn from state records. First is the age of the well and its plugs, both of which likely correlate to poor construction, plus the state’s own data on construction quality. A special bonus, so to speak, goes to injection wells with a documented history of violations or construction failures. But most significant is the number of injection wells pumping wastewater within a mile of the plugged well, into the same underground layers it connects to; the more of them there are, the higher the risk that the plug will fail and wastewater will spew above.

Put together, this analysis flagged more than 25,000 plugged wells across the state at critical risk of failure—50 times more wells at risk of going zombie than had previously been reported, as the Houston Chronicle noted when it covered our findings last month. But a failing plug does not have to cause a dramatic blowout to be dangerous. It can seep for years, and because it is buried, no one above it ever knows. A peer-reviewed Pennsylvania study found that plugged wells released benzene, a carcinogen, at rates that could not be told apart from active ones. Plugged, it turns out, is not the same as sealed.

This means health risks for anyone living above. Benzene is a known cause of leukemia; drilling waste carries naturally radioactive radium and arsenic as well. An underground leak reaches a home through the soil itself, as gas and vapor rise up through the foundation—and children, who pound for pound breathe roughly twice as much air as adults, take a double dose of whatever arrives.

Texans are living on top of a hundred years of drilling by an industry that was never made to clean up after itself. With statewide officials in Austin who rank among the largest recipients of oil and gas money in the state’s history, that is not about to change. We built the Zombie Risk map so Texans can at least see what’s under them. Look up your address.

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