Texas Matters: How community organizers beat Corpus Christi's desalination project

The Inner Harbor seawater desalination plant was proposed in Corpus Christi, especially to serve growing industrial demand.

But the project ballooned from earlier estimates of $750 million to about $1.2 billion, with residential users expected to pay for it.

Recently at a very long, emotionally charged city council meeting, many residents and environmental advocates spoke against the project. Major concerns included the high cost, fiscal risk, environmental damage —especially discharge of super-salty brine into the bay — and the unequal benefits.

But it was the cost concerns that eventually killed the project.

There was pressure from state officials pushing for desalination seeing this technology as a long-term partial solution to growing water needs for the state. For example, Governor Greg Abbott’s office had supported the project and provided some funding. But council members who opposed it said that despite the political pressure, the financial and broader benefit risks were too large.

Scrapping the Inner Harbor project is being seen as a major victory for the Corpus Christi community organizers who maintained pressure throughout the decade-long planning process. They succeeded by mobilizing public testimony, framing the environmental stakes, and focusing on transparency and fiscal accountability. Their strategy included showing how costs had escalated, how jobs or other claimed benefits were unclear, and insisting on alternatives.

The large public engagement shifted the political balance, making it politically costly for officials to support a plan seen as risky and burdensome.

Listen to David Martin Davies’ full interview with Beatriz Alvarado and Jake Hernandez, lead organizers for Texas Campaign for the Environment’s “Water for People Not Polluters” operation.