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A River Worth Saving: Who Will Protect the Unheralded Llano? The Llano River is an ecological gem in Texas Hill Country, supporting dozens of native and rare plants and animals. But due to weak state environmental protections, the Llano — along with other waterways in Texas — is increasingly facing pressure from industry and development. BY AUSTIN PRICE • JANUARY 7, 2020 n a February day in 2018, Bill Neiman walked me along the perimeter of a Pilot Flying J truck stop in Junction, Texas, five miles upstream from his farm. Semis revved and hissed in the 24-lane fueling station — some bracing for the long haul across the desert on Interstate 10 — as Neiman sidestepped trash in his muddy boots, knelt to the concrete, and motioned for me to kneel with him. He pointed to the pavement. It was concave, like a locker room shower, inclined toward a central drain. “Every drip of what’s coming out of those trucks: hazardous waste, fracking fluids, not to mention spills at every fueling lane of diesel, axle grease, transmission fluids,” he said in a penetrating North Texas twang, “the first flush during a rain, it all goes through the drains and into that concrete flume.” He pointed beyond the chain link fence, off the truck stop property. “That flume goes right to the river and dumps it all in the water. Never touches land.” The town of Junction gets its name from the nearby confluence of the North and South Llano River. From there the emerald waters of the Llano proper flow 100 miles through a mosaic of mesquite and cedar, rocky outcrops, and open rangeland. It then runs right into Texas’s Colorado River to form Lake Lyndon B. Johnson, one of six reservoirs built to manage floods and sustain Austin’s water supply. But Neiman and others upstream think of the river as a gem of Texas Hill Country — a wild and scenic river, but without Wild and Scenic River status. In fact, in Texas, only a 196-mile section of the Rio Grande in the Big Bend benefits from the federal protection warranted through the 1968 Wild and Scenic River Act. The other nearly 191,000 miles of Texas
waterways are potentially subject to the demands of private enterprise: sand mines, dams, fracking, private wells, and so on. Or, in the case of the Llano, a concrete flume that delivers effluent to the flowing river. In 2014, Tennessee-based Pilot Flying J built this truck stop on the banks of the North Llano, despite protest from Neiman and other local residents. Construction crews cleared riparian grasses and scraggly oaks as Neiman delved into Texas’ convoluted river policy and wrote a complaint to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. This wasn’t the first time Neiman, a native grasses and flower seed farmer, had tried to run private development off his local public river. In 1999, he sued a sand and gravel company called Weirich Brothers, Inc. for increasing turbidity in the river near downtown Junction. As a result, the company packed up their dredge lines and bulldozers and moved to another site, another Texas river. This time, Neiman’s complaint fell on deaf ears. But this treatment of Texas rivers isn’t unique to Pilot Flying J. Nor is it unique to the Llano. In fact, as far as Texas rivers go, the Llano has managed to escape a lot of the stress of human impact that many rivers in the state face, such as the Brazos and Trinity rivers that flow through the state’s urban triangle — an urbanizing region of the state boxed in between Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. Even in the 1950s, when the writer John Graves paddled his canoe down the Brazos, he could foresee how ambiguous boundaries between private development and public rivers would cause local waterways to fall through the cracks of environmental protection. “Maybe you save a Dinosaur Monument from time to time,” he wrote in his 1959 Goodbye
Austin Price
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The Young Writers Awards, presented by Yale Environment 360 and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, honor the best nonfiction environmental writing by authors under the age of 35. Entries for 2020 were received from six continents, with a prize of $2,000 going to the first-place winner. Read all the winners at: https://e360.yale.edu/series/ 2020-young-writers-awards to a River, “but inbetween such salvations, you lose ten Brazoses.”
As the public Llano flows its 100 miles through private-property Texas, who’s looking out for one of the state’s last wild rivers? The Llano isn’t a mighty Western river by any means. But I’ve grown attached to it. I got married on its riverbank, and when I lived in Austin, I considered it a respite from the city’s Barton Creek and a reminder of wilder rivers in wilder places. But beyond that, the Llano River is home to numerous species of bass, gar, armadillos, rattlesnakes, and migrating monarch butterflies — as well as to farmers like Neiman who live off the river, grow crops with its water, and care for its banks. But the Llano is an abused river, as Neiman showed me. It’s public property taken advantage of by private business and landowners through ambiguous environmental protections. And these damages are often unseen by the public. As per Graves, save a Big Bend from time to time, but in between, you lose a Llano. The question is: As the public Llano flows its 100 miles through privateproperty Texas, who’s looking out for one of the state’s last wild rivers? — A few weeks later, I met Tyson Broad, the watershed coordinator at Texas Tech University’s Llano River Field Station, for lunch in downtown Mason. “I respect property rights,” he told me between bites of his Reuben. “But there’s private property and there’s public property. A lot of people only respect private property rights. Rivers of this state, they belong to everybody.” Our table overlooked the main street that runs through town. Broad explained how from downtown Mason, 100 miles due west of Austin and a crossroads between the fracking grounds at Permian Basin to the west and the Eagle Ford Shale to the south, you wouldn’t know that the Llano flows through some of its most iconic geography just a few miles away. There, the river widens and winds through limestone bluffs spotted with ashe juniper and prickly pear hanging onto gritty soil atop sandstone bluffs. Beyond those bluffs, the land opens up to rolling hills spotted with springgreen mesquite and deeply rooted live oaks. But in Mason, the town square buzzes with a West Texas industrial energy. Broad and I talked over the clatter of semis that barreled through town on the abnormally wide main street. “What is that?” Broad said at one point, almost to himself, as a series of trucks sped closely past, carrying oversized hauls of fracking pumps and cylindrical tanks. The river takes second place to the boomtown mentality in this town and others like it in Central Texas. But Broad’s trying to change that, or at least change some of the status quo land management practices that threaten the river. In 2016, Broad co-wrote a Watershed Protection Plan with another researcher at the field station named Tom Arsuffi. The plan lays out concerns with current land management practices, such as the adverse ef-