Paper No. 16: The Politics of Water And Woody Hunt (August 30, 2021) Policy Paper

In 2001 “water planners widely assumed that El Paso ‐ ‘that parched desert city’ ‐ would run out of water by 2030…Juárez, they said, might deplete its water in a matter of several years…into this ‘crisis’ scenario stepped would‐be water marketers like El Paso businessman and University of Texas regent Woody Hunt and Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz.” Reports described “the two men gallivanting around West Texas in search of underwater sources and concocting high‐flying plans to sell water to El Paso.”

As El Pasoans recover from the most recent flooding, the obvious question has been why? Why hasn’t the local government fixed the flooding problems? Although an important question to have because of the recent flooding, there is an even more important question the community needs to ask ‐ who controls the water policies for El Paso?