Concerned about water quality, Fort Worth companies pour money into the Trinity Basin

The November 2018 presentation said it all: “It Takes Great Water to Make Great Beer. To Make Great Water Takes Great Responsibility.”

That’s how Molson Coors summed up its motivations for investing close to $9 million into improving water supply in the Trinity River basin. For nearly a decade, Fort Worth’s MillerCoors brewery — the largest and oldest in the city — has worked with the Tarrant Regional Water District to fund erosion control projects in the Richland-Chambers reservoir.

More companies than ever are interested in pursuing similar initiatives, said Darrel Andrews, the water district’s assistant environmental director. But many of those corporations have faced a consistent issue in Texas: Government agencies and nonprofit groups are not always ready with project proposals that fit the company’s goals, Andrews said.

“There had to be a way to get a bigger group together that we can plug folks into because you hate to have people that want to invest in environmental stewardship and then not have a project for them,” Andrews said.

A diverse group of conservation organizations, government agencies and multinational corporations have formed the Texas Water Action Collaborative, or TxWAC, to address the challenge head on. While there are plans to add more companies, the list of founding members includes Molson Coors, Frito-Lay North America, PepsiCo North America, Coca-Cola North America and Keurig Dr. Pepper.

The new partnership, modeled after a similar initiative in California, seeks to invest millions into projects that will improve water quality and quantity in the Upper Trinity River basin, which is centered in the Dallas-Fort Worth region. Besides private companies, the Trinity River Authority, the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service and the water district are all on board.

Texas is unique in that more than 95% of land is privately owned, requiring solutions that engage landowners directly, said Joni Carswell, the CEO of Texan By Nature, the environmental nonprofit founded by Laura Bush. Her organization is taking the lead on coordinating the group’s communications and matching corporate money with conservation proposals.

“You really have to have projects that bring together civic leaders, industry leaders, private landowners and conservation leaders to do widespread initiatives and make a real difference for water,” Carswell said. “The hardest part of that is figuring out the right partners, the timeline of the project, and then how you’re going to measure the return.”

How did the collaboration come together? Molson Coors has put millions toward incentive payments to landowners who take steps to reduce erosion and sedimentation. The more soil particles and pollutants that enter a lake, the less capacity it has for water, said Aaron Hoff, the water district’s watershed programs manager. With more sediment in the water, city water departments also have to pay more to treat it, leading to higher costs for residents, Hoff said.

With the water’s district’s help, Coors’ donations are sent to government subdivisions known as soil and water conservation districts, which are run by locally elected landowners.

“Through collective partnership, we have restored an estimated eight billion gallons of water to the watershed, and we look forward to scaling our impact by working with more organizations through this collaborative,” Kim Marotta, senior director of global sustainability for Molson Coors, said in a statement.

Last year, Molson Coors approached Hoff and other officials with ideas to bring more corporate funding into the mix. Their proposals went beyond the water district’s jurisdiction in Tarrant County and the Trinity River basin, Hoff said.

“It really became a case where we didn’t want to be making decisions for companies, landowners, cities and nonprofits who operate these other regions of the Trinity that are outside of our locus,” Hoff said. “This is a way to expand this partnership, not just within one watershed but the entire DFW metropolitan area and hopefully even further south into the rest of the Trinity basin.”

Carswell echoed the desire to use the new collaborative as a template that could be followed in the Brazos River basin and other river systems in Texas. She hopes to resolve some of the “perceived mismatches” between corporate and environmental goals in the state.

“In Texas, we’re all proud of our state and we want to do well by it, but we go about it in different ways,” Carswell said. “Now, with the focus on environmental goals and climate impact, there really is opportunity to drive dialogue and close those gaps in terminology. You’re all saying the same thing, just using different words. We can do this together.”

Texan By Nature is finishing its survey of corporations and conservation groups about their priorities when it comes to water issues in the Trinity, Carswell said. For the water district, that means addressing long-term trends showing a slight uptick in soil nutrients and chlorophyll a in the Trinity River.

A higher percentage of chlorophyll a indicates higher algae growth, which eats up oxygen in the water and can lead to fish kills, Hoff and Andrews said.

“Part of why we started the watershed program is because we started seeing these long term trends,” Andrews said. “The reason TRWD gets involved is the same reason why Molson Coors and Coca-Cola and the other partners get involved: a heightened sense of environmental awareness. The world has just become more sensitive to environmental issues.”

By the end of summer, the collaborative hopes to start matching conservation groups with interested companies, Carswell said. As more water systems throughout Texas begin to work together on directing funding toward the right projects, Texan by Nature can start to look at other environmental needs as well, she said.

“This is a real opportunity to build on a collaborative, more educational model that started in California and really utilize the personalities and the frameworks that we have here in Texas to make a tremendous difference,” Carswell said. “More than ever, it’s necessary as the population is growing, more industry is moving here all the time. It really is an opportunity to set up this model.”