SJRA Calls Special Board Meeting to Discuss Settlement of 9-Year-Old Lawsuit
8/12/2025 – The San Jacinto River Authority (SJRA) will hold a special meeting of its board of directors on Friday, August 15, 2025, at 10 AM. It will be held at the SJRA’s Administration building at 1577 Dam Site Road, Conroe, TX.
Directors will consider one item in executive session – settlement of its lawsuit against the City of Conroe. The dispute concerns Conroe’s Groundwater Reduction Plan contract with the SJRA.
To provide public comment, you must appear in person. However, you can still watch the meeting via the Internet here.
Case Began in 2016
The case began nine years ago in 2016.
Several years earlier, SJRA developed a Groundwater Reduction Plan to reduce the demands on the Gulf Coast Aquifer system made by a fast growing population in Montgomery County. Growth was depleting aquifers and lowering water levels in wells faster than water was being replaced.
So, SJRA signed contracts with a number of municipalities to help migrate them to surface water. But that required SJRA to build a surface water treatment plant at Lake Conroe. To do that, the SJRA sold bonds totaling $550 million, which it is now trying to repay.
But Conroe and other municipalities balked at the price of SJRA water. And they began pumping cheaper groundwater while disputing evidence of subsidence.
It’s hard to track developments in this case because it has moved back and forth from Montgomery County District Court to the Ninth Judicial Court of Appeals in Beaumont and the Texas Supreme Court several times.
Many of the appeals are on limited aspects of the case. In 2020, the Supreme Court of Texas ruled that Conroe could not invoke governmental immunity against the SJRA. Their ruling provides a good summary of the issues in the case at that time.
Case Still Not Decided in Second Trip to Supreme Court
The litigants later went into mediation. That didn’t produce a settlement, so the parties started appealing various aspects of the arbitration. Eventually, the case circled back around to the Supreme Court of Texas in 2024.
Justice Busby delivered the opinion of the court at that time. In the first paragraph, he signaled judicial impatience. As if speaking to a third party about the SJRA and Conroe, Busby wrote “So far, their taxpayers and ratepayers have been funding only procedural and jurisdictional skirmishes distantly related to the merits of the dispute.”
The Supreme Court sided with SJRA on several limited issues and remanded the case back to the trial court for additional deliberations. Again.
In 2022, various parties owed the SJRA close to $30 million. This is one of those cases where neither side can afford to lose and the lawyers have every incentive to keep it going.
Subsidence Continues as Case Continues
It will be interesting to see what happens Friday.
In the meantime, I’ve spoken to more residents of the Woodlands whose homes and lives are being undermined by subsidence-related faulting. But more on that in a future post.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 8/12/2025
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