East Texas water district director leaves post amid Lake O' the Pines water sale debacle

DAINGERFIELD — The Northeast Texas Municipal Water District has been under scrutiny since plans to sell billions of gallons of water from Lake O’ the Pines to the Dallas-Fort Worth area emerged in December.

Wayne Owen, the district’s board-appointed executive director and the most visible advocate for the proposed sale, was relieved of duty during a packed NETMWD board meeting Monday evening in Daingerfield.

The seven board members representing each of the cities making up the water district voted unanimously to approve a “mutual separation agreement” with Owen.

The board members themselves are appointed by city councils in Avinger, Daingerfield, Hughes Springs, Jefferson, Lone Star, Ore City and Pittsburg.

Water district accountant Osiris Brantley will replace Owen in an interim capacity beginning April 1.

Owen faced an intense public backlash from area residents and local officials since early February, when state Rep. Jay Dean, R-Longview, organized a town hall meeting near Lake O’ the Pines, excoriating Owen for negotiating a “backroom secret deal” to pipe water to Dallas-area suburbs.

The rally cry by Dean and other local politicians was buttressed by scientific modeling by the nonprofit Caddo Lake Institute, which found that the sale in combination with a drought event would decimate Lake O’ the Pines and Caddo, Texas’ only naturally formed lake.

The Monday meeting was moved to a bigger space in Daingerfield at the Morris County Annex to accommodate what was expected to be a larger than normal crowd. And it was. The 100 or so seats inside were quickly accounted for while many attendees stood on the flanks.

Owen’s contract termination did little to relieve pressure on the water district’s board members.

“Just because the board members have cut off the strings to its puppet does not mean that puppet masters get off scot-free,” said Chris Lepri, a Marion County resident who was first to speak during the meeting’s open comment period.

For more than an hour, residents, attorneys, two mayors (from Uncertain and Lone Star), a Marion County judge and several representatives from area environmental advocacy groups demanded water board members abandon any future deal to send water out of East Texas.

The water board’s apparent culpability in the proposal became a theme as the night went on.

“You have hidden yourselves, your contact information, your plans, and refused to seriously consider scientific objective studies,” said former state Rep. David Simpson, who lives in Avinger. “Allow others who operate in the sunlight to take your place.”

NETMWD has pursued new commercial-scale customers for more than a decade in order to meet anticipated budget shortfalls as electrical utilities and heavy industry, the traditional backbone of the district’s budget, have shuttered across East Texas in recent years.

The proposed water sale revealed in December involved NETMWD and the North Texas Municipal Water District — representing the cities of McKinney, Plano, Frisco and Forney, among others — and would send up to 43 billion gallons annually to the Dallas-Fort Worth area in exchange for payments to NETMWD and its member cities, according to an analysis by the Caddo Lake Institute.

The presence of a non-disclosure agreement limiting information about the planned water sale also proved divisive. It was signed by the water district in 2023 and will remain active into early summer.

Marshall Jones, an attorney from North Louisiana with property interests at Caddo Lake, alleged the NDA was more than unethical — it was illegal.

“It’s an agreement between two government entities that are defined by the Texas Government Code,” Jones said. “Each of y’all individually are in violation of the Texas public records law.”

He also assailed board members with the possibility of a lawsuit, further alleging that if any of them “took a stay at a hotel or a trip to Dallas with Wayne Davis [sic]... that constitutes public corruption.”

A mustachioed Caddo Lake resident named Duane Meyers reoriented the conversation toward wildfires.

“We have so much energy stored in our forests that we have here, that if we don’t have water, we can’t put that out,” he said. “No water is a death sentence.”

However, the largest applause was saved for Lake O’ the Pines resident Mary Spearman, who spoke to the emotional significance the two lakes have for those who have made lasting memories on them.

“My children grew up on the lake. We spent weekends on the lakes swimming, fishing, just picnicking,” she said. “What legacy are we leaving for them? We want them to have and enjoy the same thing that we enjoy. We want them to have the lake. We want them to swim. We want them to learn to fish.”

As much as the lakes support life, she said, they also represent a way of life.

Lake O’ the Pines could be virtually unrecognizable with most of its boat ramps rendered useless during a severe drought, according to a preliminary model by the Caddo Lake Institute examining the effects of the proposed water sale during an extreme drought.

The meeting ended without board members acknowledging or committing to the most common demand among opponents of the proposed deal: to prevent any future sale of water out of East Texas.

In the annex parking lot, Jefferson board member George Ottstot entertained lingering questions in the twilight as audience members took stock of what was and wasn’t addressed Monday evening.

Ottstot told the Jefferson City Council in December that the money member city’s stood to make from the sale was “life altering.”

But on Monday night, he denied having ever seen details of the proposed sale.

“I’m not positive it was ever presented to the board,” Ottstot said. “There’s not enough money, period, to buy our water. You just can’t do that.”

Stacey Satterfield-Terry, a Hughes Springs resident, appreciated Ottstot making himself available.

“I still don’t trust him at all,” she said, “(Wayne) Owen was a scapegoat and a pawn in (the district’s) chess game. This isn’t over.”

The grass roots participation on display at the meeting was something Caddo Lake Institute Executive Director Laura-Ashley Overdyke hasn’t seen in the three decades since the nonprofit organization was founded.

“It makes sense because without water, nothing else matters,” she said.