The proposed Marvin Nichols Reservoir has been opposed by water planners in Northeast Texas since it first became an issue more than 20 years ago.

Region D (Northeast Texas) has repeatedly fought and lobbied against the efforts of Region C (Dallas area) water planners to keep the reservoir out of the state water plan, and local landowners and businessmen like Ward Timber have gone as far as filing, and winning, a lawsuit to block the reservoir’s construction.

The behemoth project in the Sulphur River basin is projected to take an approximate 250,000 acres including the 66,000 acres in the footprint of the reservoir plus up to an additional three times that amount for mitigation.

Janice Bezanson, the senior policy advisor for the Texas Conservation Alliance, has been involved with the battle to keep the proposed reservoir out of the state water plan for decades. Bezanson told the Tribune last week that the draft Marvin Nichols Reservoir Project Feasibility Review by the Texas Water Development Board is not a serious effort to assess whether the reservoir project would be good for Texas and Texans. It is superficial and very biased toward construction.

Bezanson stated, “The report uses a severely limited definition of what constitutes “feasible”. Basically, it assumes that if the reservoir could be built, then it is “not infeasible”. There is no effort to assess whether it should be built. There is very little mention of the huge negative impacts Marvin Nichols would have on the northeast region of Texas. Indeed, while acknowledging that there have been several economic reports done of the impacts of the reservoir, it cites only biased reports, commissioned by the entities who want to build the reservoir, re-