Voters approve drought surcharges for big industry

For eight years, Corpus Christi’s refineries and chemical plants paid pennies to skip drought charges, even as the city’s reservoirs nearly ran dry. On Tuesday, voters ended that deal.

Proposition B, the Fair Water Amendment, passed by a two-to-one margin and repealed the drought surcharge exemption fee, even though industry spent heavily against it.

City and business leaders set up the exemption in 2018, at the height of the shale oil boom. Refineries and chemical plants could pay 31 cents per 1,000 gallons to avoid any future drought surcharges.

The money was supposed to help pay for the Inner Harbor seawater desalination plant, which would supply water to new and growing industrial sites. It never came close. While the fee ultimately raised about $6 million a year, the plant’s estimated cost climbed from about $200 million to more than $1 billion, with yearly payments nearing $70 million before the City Council called off the project.

The exemption also left the city with no way to make its largest users save water, even as a five-year drought dropped reservoirs below 8 percent full this May. Industry uses more than half of the region’s water.

The adopted amendment adds Section 12 to Article IX of the city charter, ending the exemption and banning new ones. Instead, large industrial users will now be required to pay the drought surcharges set in the city’s March 2025 Drought Contingency Plan, beginning after a required five-year notification period.

The region’s biggest user is the Gulf Coast Growth Ventures plastics plant, owned by ExxonMobil and SABIC. In 2025 it used 13.5 million gallons a day, close to what all city residents use combined. With reservoirs below 20 percent, the plant would pay about $81,000 more per day for water. Reservoirs stayed below that level for 19 months, until heavy rain in July.

To get the measure on the ballot, Texas Campaign for the Environment, For the Greater Good and other Coastal Bend community partners gathered nearly 13,000 verified signatures early this year. In August, the City Council voted to put the measure before voters against the urging of city staff, who claimed the proposal constituted a “climate charter” disallowed by state law without pre-approval from Texas lawmakers.

Proposition B’s victory came on a historic night in Texas. Democratic challengers beat Republican incumbents in every statewide race, and State Rep. Gina Hinojosa became the state’s first Democratic governor since Ann Richards was defeated in 1994. In Corpus Christi, Del Mar College professor Paul Gottemoller said the Proposition B fight was not a partisan issue but rather about local business interests versus populist anger over water.

“We overcame all that money,” said Council Member Sylvia Campos, who backed the measure.

Click here to read the full story by Dylan Baddour, Spencer Cihak and Emily Salazar.