Sulphur River Basin Authority Board of Directors will meet Tuesday for the first time since Board President Mike Sandefur resigned the governor-appointed seat two weeks ago.
He was elected president in June 2016, just days before SRBA's public hearing before the Texas Sunset Commission, which performs effectiveness and efficiency reviews of all state agencies.
The commission released a report in April recommending SRBA seek additional funding and increase transparency and trust with the media and local stakeholders in Wright Patman Lake. It also recommended they seek local financial investment in its water development projects, and to seek bids for the next phase of the feasibility study to determine if the lake's water level can be raised and, if so, how high. Since then, the committee has adopted those recommendations, and they will be voted on during the 85th Texas Legislature, which began last week.
During his tenure as board president, Sandefur addressed many of these issues by developing a strategic plan, working with the board on open meetings requirements and seeking assistance with studies conducted within the basin.
In his resignation letter addressed to Gov. Greg Abbott, Sandefur wrote that SRBA has made great strides in improving operations and increasing transparency in order to work toward meeting the watershed's growing and controversial needs.
"Further, our board has worked diligently to hit the reset button, trying to re-establish the relationships and trust between SRBA and some of its stakeholders. My focus has been to collaborate, and our efforts to do so are well-documented," he wrote. "However, as the Sunset Commission Report stated in its executive summary, 'Some stakeholders can be divisive, antagonistic and appear to be largely driven by their own financial motivations or wishes to control future water rights.' I find this to be absolutely true."
Electing a new president and/or vice president is on Tuesday's agenda. SRBA bylaws state that SRBA Vice President Wally Kraft became president upon Sandefur's resignation. The board could support keeping Kraft as president or elect new leadership during the meeting.
Other agenda items include discussion and action on approving an instream flow study and a controversial study by the Sulphur Basin Group, which shows a potentially drastic reduction of water available in Wright Patman. It also shows using the lake and the proposed Marvin Nichols Reservoir as future water supplies. The water modeling used in the SBG study has been questioned, as it is a hybridized form of the modeling used in previous studies and an accurate comparison cannot be made between them.
Stakeholders, including Riverbend Water Resources District, the city of Texarkana, Texas, and Ward Timber, asked SRBA during their last meeting to not approve the studies, with Ward's Public Relations and Governmental Representative Andrea Williams McCoy submitting an information request for copies of all studies conducted within the basin. Texarkana also made a formal information request at that time for the studies, but that has since been withdrawn.
The studies were not approved during that meeting, and now appear on the January agenda, along with proposal for payment to SBG and RPS, who conducted the instream flow study.
Also at Tuesday's meeting, Wilf and Henderson will present the 2016 audit, and the board will hear updates on the Clean Rivers Program and the feasibility study.
The meeting will be held at 1 p.m. at the Mount Pleasant Convention Center, 1800 N. Jefferson St., Mount Pleasant, Texas.