What might have been an election pitting the dry areas of Texas against the wet areas — the areas without enough water for lawns versus the areas they might raid for water — instead turned into an easy win for a proposal to pump $2 billion into the state’s water planning fund.
Proposition 6, which takes $2 billion from the state’s Rainy Day Fund for use in financing water projects around the state, passed with no problem, even in areas mostly untouched by the historic drought plaguing the state.
Less than 10 percent of the state’s 254 counties voted against the proposal, and those counties were sprinkled throughout Texas. In the 20 counties with the most voters, the proposition passed easily enough to swamp “No” votes elsewhere, making passage certain just minutes after the first tallies came in on Election Night.
This is a map of the Texas drought with the vote totals on the water amendment. The idea was to show the correlation, if any, between the success of the water measure and the severity of the water shortages around the state. Use the sliders below to adjust the transparency of each layer. Click on a county to view its vote totals.
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Comments (6)
Lloyd Sargent via Texas Tribune on Facebook
I own a ranch. I need water. But Prop. 6 is more of a slush fund than a solution. That's why I voted No. This is a bad law and it will hurt rural Texas.
Budman 007
It is not a bad law, it is a revolving loan fund. No panacea but it will allow those interested to find low interest loan money for water conveyance projects, that they pay back. Actually a big help to all of Texas-- moving water more efficiently--including rural Texas.
D W
you know farmers and ranchers are among the biggest that need water. as does almost any industrial business. but if not this plan then what? trying to get business to do it is redoing the same exercise we did with electricity. and how did that work out? prices are among the highest in the country. and getting more production of it, seems to be failing big time (for some reason business doent want to invest in new production until they see long term demand. especially when their investment is in the multi billion range to create new power plants). given that why would handing it off to business be such a grand idea for water?
Vivian Ballard via Texas Tribune on Facebook
This is a cool graphic, no matter how you feel about Prop. 6.
Lloyd Sargent via Texas Tribune on Facebook
MIGHT fund. It is not a given what it will fund. You are far too trusting if you believe the result will be benign.
Gwen Dallas
I tend to think that the Prop 6 vote correlates more with voters' attitudes toward government in general; I suspect you will find a reasonably strong correlation between the Prop 6 vote and the other amendments. To be sure some people were anti-6 for very specific reasons. But some people just feel compelled to vote "no" on everything.
(I think it was striking that Debbie Medina wrote the anti- op-ed on Prop 6; anecdotally - outside of the Tea Party - it seems that Prop 6 support was pretty much universal).
What I would do is average out the vote on all the statewide ballot props, and take that as a "general agreeability index," and then compare the county vote against that.
I can see from checking a few counties on the SOS web site (Bastrop, San Saba, San Augustine, Bowie) that anti-6 counties also tended to be less supportive of other props, especially Prop 3 and Prop 5.