Senator Perry on Water and Guns

SAN ANGELO, TX — Sen. Charles Perry represents District 28, based in Lubbock in west Texas and known as the largest State senate district in Texas —spanning 51 counties and 48,000 mostly rural square miles.

He chairs the State Senate’s Committee on Water and Rural Affairs. He championed Senate Bill 8 that created a State Flood Plan with emphasis on securing high hazard dams, many of those being located in west Texas. Gov. Greg Abbott signed Perry’s bill into law on Jun 10.

What are the next issues facing west Texas with water?

“As a state we’re dependent on rainfall for 97 percent of our recharge into our reservoirs or underground [water], so when it doesn’t rain, we have droughts. And if we don’t have a plan to provide water during those drought periods, we see large economic impacts on the State budget,” said Perry. During the last drought earlier this decade, agriculture was particularly impacted. In cattle, Texas lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 billion in exports, Perry said.

Perry is looking for undeveloped or under-developed water resources to help shore up west Texas’ water supply for when next drought happens. As the senator representing part of the Permian Basin from Rankin to Pecos, Perry said oil production is generating trillions of gallons of water that is going to waste. You cannot drink it. But maybe the technology is there to doo something with it today. Perry wants to find out.

“We don’t know if it is economically viable, but I believe it is based on technology we see around the world, to actually clean that water up to the point of rechargeability to the aquifers, into the river basins, and not let it go to [waste],” he said.

If we can recapture just 60 percent of water being used or harvested today during oil and gas production, it will net 1.4 trillion gallons of water that could be treated for use. That is one year’s worth of water for every household in Texas, Perry said.

In the wake of the tragedy in El Paso, we surprised Perry with a question about how this incident may impact State laws, particularly in gun control. Of proposals being floated in Washington that seem to be gaining momentum are so-called “red flag” laws where anyone can tag a citizen as being unstable and their right to purchase or even possess firearms could be taken away for short periods of time.

Such laws would require state and local law enforcement and magistrates to enforce.

Perry wasn’t in favor. While he admitted everyone is seeking a policy answer to address the shootings, but Perry reminded us that, “The Second Amendment was put into the Bill of Rights for a reason, to give citizens a way to protect themselves from an overreaching government. I don’t see that making it harder for a law-abiding citizen to have [firearms] is the answer here.”

“When you set up a law [like a red flag law], you set up a person [in government] with the power of making that determination. And with our politics — the rancor — as out of control as they are now, with everybody looking for a foothold that’s politically based and not rational, and [in that environment should we] give control for an individual to make that determination, ‘are you mentally fit? Are you not mentally fit?’” he asked.

Perry said these kinds of questions are being asked in the medical industry today, like when you visit a doctor. He said he wanted to keep those kinds of questions in the doctors’ office and not elevate them to the next level.

“Bigger government is not the answer,” Perry said.