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David Montagne: Water Supply for the Sabine River Basin
The SRA is building a new, $75 million pump station in the lower Sabine River basin.
T
he Sabine River Authority (SRA) was created by the Texas Legislature in 1949 to store, control, preserve, and distribute water. With 115 employees and a service area of over 7,400 square miles, the SRA helps conserve water and distribute it to large Texas cities, such as Dallas and Longview, and industrial customers near the Gulf of Mexico. David Montagne is the executive vice president and general manager of the SRA and has worked for the authority for 34 years. In this interview, he tells Municipal Water Leader about the SRA’s current projects and its plans for the future. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
6 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | July/August 2020
Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the SRA and its history. David Montagne: The SRA was created by an act of the legislature in 1949. It has a nine-member board of directors whose members are appointed by the governor. The SRA’s first project was purchasing a canal system in Orange, Texas, that had solely rice-field contracts. Then the SRA entered into negotiations with the City of Dallas, and in the late 1950s, it started to build Lake Tawakoni, a 37,000‑surface-acre reservoir with a firm yield of over 238,000 acre-feet. That reservoir was finished in the early 1960s. Like a lot of reservoirs in Texas, it was built because of the drought of the 1950s. The SRA’s next major project was Toledo Bend Reservoir, which got a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission license in 1963 and was completed in 1968. It is the largest surface-acre reservoir in the southern United States at 185,000 surface acres municipalwaterleader.com
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE SRA.
David Montagne: I’ve been working with the SRA for 34 years. I have an accounting degree from Lamar University in Beaumont, and I previously worked in accounting and served as the executive director of a housing authority for a brief stint. That was an interesting job, but I saw how many federal overlays there are for everything and couldn’t accomplish some of the things I wanted to, so it was also a pretty frustrating job. Since coming to the SRA, I have represented Texas on the Western States Water Council,
served as president of the Texas Water Conservation Association, and been a member of the Texas Ethics Commission. I currently serve as a member of the Texas State University System’s board of regents.
