Abbott: city must move ahead with Inner Harbor desal or risk takeover
Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent political shockwaves through the Coastal Bend last week, threatening to seize control of Corpus Christi city government if local leaders don't move fast enough on the city's water crisis – and his outburst is already being used by Mayor Paulette Guajardo to try to fast-track a City Council decision on the controversial Inner Harbor desalination plant.
Abbott’s blowup came March 10 at a campaign stop near Austin, when a reporter asked the Governor whether he was monitoring the water situation in Corpus Christi. His response was angry:
"We've been doing more than monitoring it. We've been actively involved in it, going back a long time. We provided them with $750 million in funding. You know what they did? They squandered it. Corpus Christi is a victim not because of lack of water. They're a victim because of a lack of ability to make a decision. What Corpus Christi leaders have to do is make a decision. We can only give them a little time more before the state of Texas has to take over and run that city.”
Abbott’s threat created an immediate reaction at Corpus Christi City Hall. Within hours, Mayor Paulette Guajardo posted on Facebook announcing a special “emergency” City Council meeting on the Inner Harbor desalination plant. In a follow-up post, she said the meeting would be held on Thursday, April 9, accelerating a timeline that city staff had just last month placed in May.
Missing from Abbott's scolding were the actual reasons for the region’s water crisis. City leaders have been pursuing seawater desalination for the better part of a decade, driven entirely by the huge water demands of massive refineries and petrochemical plants recruited to the area by the city itself. Today just a handful of large industrial users consume nearly 60 percent of the city’s water.
The Inner Harbor desalination plant was intended to be the city’s answer to industrial demand, but the project became a case study in ballooning costs; what began as a $200 million proposal in 2019 morphed into a $1.2 billion behemoth by mid-2025, prompting a City Council majority – including Councilmembers Sylvia Campos, Gil Hernandez, Kaylynn Paxson, Eric Cantu and Carolyn Vaughn – to vote terminate the project’s design contract with vendor Kiewit.
Yet within weeks of the September vote, city staff was back at the drawing board, approaching a second-ranked bidder – Corpus Christi Desal Partners – and in February, the council voted 5–3 to authorize new contract negotiations. The new, preliminary price tag: at least $979 million.
But since pulling the plug on Kiewit, the Council has also acted on a range of expensive new water projects, including drilling wells, purchasing groundwater rights, and investing in the Harbor Island seawater desalination project, all of which has already driven up the projected increase in residents’ water bills substantially; to now revive the Inner Harbor desal plant could result in an annual increase in residents’ water bills exceeding $500, according to some reports.
Lost also in Abbott’s tantrum and Guajardo’s rush are serious, still-unresolved environmental concerns surrounding the Inner Harbor plant. The plant’s reverse osmosis process would pump tens of millions of gallons of concentrated brine back into the Inner Harbor each day. Marine scientists warn that such an influx of high-salinity wastewater into the shallow, semi-enclosed bay system could create oxygen-depleted “dead zones” that suffocate fish, shrimp, crabs and other aquatic life – an enormous gamble with an irreplaceable ecosystem.
Still, despite having had the plant under development for years, the city has only recently agreed to commission a comprehensive far-field study examining the impact of the plant’s discharge on the entire bay system, and now estimates that the study will be complete until the end of June.
But with Abbott's threat ringing in the air, the mayor wants to vote in April – seemingly weeks before a negotiated contract can even be properly prepared, and months before receiving the results of the environmental study to determine whether the bay is at risk.
The central question now is whether the same five Council members who voted down the Kiewit proposal in September will likewise stand up to Greg Abbott and Paulette Guajardo, and continue to require basic facts – like exactly what impact a billion-dollar desalination plant will have on Corpus Christi's residential water bills, and on our bay – before casting their vote.