01 · Shortfall by 2030
The gap starts this decade.
Under dry conditions, TRWD's own modeling shows it could fall about 7% short of meeting demand by 2030 — a gap it would have to close with drought restrictions or emergency measures.
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This isn't only a Henderson County lake. Cedar Creek Reservoir was built by Tarrant County, for Tarrant County, and roughly three out of every four glasses of water poured in Fort Worth, Arlington, and Mansfield start here. One data center already tried to draw five million gallons a day at the source, and backed off. But Tarrant Regional Water District, the board Tarrant County voters elect, still owns this water and can sell it to the next one. We’re asking TRWD to hold any data center to Governor Abbott’s standard: reuse their own water, and weigh the impact on surrounding communities before selling a drop of the lake.
The Tarrant Regional Water District owns Cedar Creek Reservoir and pumps its water back to the Metroplex through hundreds of miles of pipeline. The proposed data center wants to take its share off the top, at the reservoir, before a drop of it ever heads west.
33,750 acres in Henderson County, owned and operated by TRWD.
Fort Worth, Arlington, Mansfield & 50+ wholesale customers, more than 2 million people.
Cedar Creek and Richland-Chambers, TRWD's two East Texas reservoirs, are connected to Tarrant County by more than 250 miles of pipeline and a chain of pump stations. Sources: Tarrant Regional Water District; Fort Worth Report, 2025.
The Tarrant Regional Water District was created by the Tarrant County Commissioners Court in 1924, after the catastrophic 1922 Fort Worth flood, to manage flooding and secure water. When the local West Fork lakes, Eagle Mountain and Bridgeport, could no longer keep up, the District moved east and built Cedar Creek Reservoir in the 1960s and 70s, then pumped its water back to Fort Worth through the District's first great pipeline.
Everything that makes Cedar Creek useful to North Texas, the reservoir, the 250 miles of pipeline, the pump stations that are TRWD's single largest power cost, was financed by Tarrant County ratepayers and bondholders. This lake is, in the most literal sense, a Tarrant County public asset that happens to sit in Henderson County.
And TRWD's five-member Board of Directors is elected by Tarrant County voters. The people who decide whether a data center gets a contract to drain this lake answer to you.
The applicant's request to the Tarrant Regional Water District is for 5 million gallons of raw water per day, about 1.8 billion gallons a year, through a new, dedicated intake on Cedar Creek. That water is taken at the reservoir, before it is ever pumped the 75-plus miles west to Tarrant County treatment plants.
Five million gallons a day is enough drinking water for a Texas town of roughly 50,000 people. Handed, instead, to a single industrial customer, to cool servers and evaporate into the sky.
And the applicant would be first, not last. TRWD's own staff have noted that data centers are lining up across the region with similar raw-water requests. Every contract approved at Cedar Creek becomes the precedent for the next one, and the lake only holds so much.
TRWD spent a century and billions of dollars building a water supply for Tarrant County families. It was never built to air-condition a server farm in Henderson County.
This is the worst possible moment to give industrial water away. According to the state's Region C water plan, Tarrant County alone will need more than 673,000 acre-feet of water by 2080, and roughly a third of North Texas's future water must come from new sources that do not yet exist.
TRWD is spending heavily to stay ahead of that gap, banking on aggressive conservation that already saves the region around 20 billion gallons a year, and weighing multi-billion-dollar projects like the proposed $7 billion Marvin Nichols Reservoir just to keep taps flowing for a population expected to double.
Into that tight arithmetic, every million gallons a day promised to a data center is a million gallons TRWD must replace, through conservation Tarrant families are asked to shoulder, or new supply Tarrant ratepayers must fund. Industrial data-center demand was never in the plan. It shouldn't be allowed to jump the line.
In August 2025, the Tarrant Regional Water District published its official Integrated Water Supply Plan Update — a 50-year engineering look at the very supply that feeds Tarrant County. In TRWD's own numbers, that supply is already stretched thin and could fall short within a few years. This isn't an advocacy paper. It's the water provider's own analysis, which is exactly what makes it powerful.
None of those numbers include a hyperscale data center. A new five-million-gallon-a-day customer would land on top of a system the District already projects will run short.
Under dry conditions, TRWD's own modeling shows it could fall about 7% short of meeting demand by 2030 — a gap it would have to close with drought restrictions or emergency measures.
TRWD built the plan around its most aggressive growth scenario because actual demand is already tracking that high. The region set back-to-back record water-use years in 2022 and 2023.
The forecast is driven by population and suburban growth. A large industrial user like a hyperscale data center doesn't appear to be included — so that demand would land on top of a system already projecting a gap.
Because of sedimentation, the reliable yield from Cedar Creek Reservoir — the source at the heart of this fight — is projected to decline over the coming decades, not grow.
The plan lists buying groundwater near Lake Palestine, in Henderson County, to shore up supply. A wholesaler buying new water to stay reliable is not a system with spare capacity to give away.
The District lists stakeholder and community acceptance as one of its four core planning objectives — and acknowledges that new water projects can meet local resistance.
Source: Tarrant Regional Water District, Integrated Water Supply Plan Update — Executive Summary, August 2025. All figures are from TRWD's published modeling.
The TRWD board is elected by Tarrant County voters, and its biggest customers are Tarrant County cities. That gives this county real leverage, if it uses it.
The elected TRWD Board of Directors should decline any raw-water contract for data-center use, or condition it on closed-loop cooling, data-center-first drought curtailment, and 100% developer-paid infrastructure. No new straw in Cedar Creek without those guarantees.
As TRWD's largest wholesale customers, these city councils have standing and a voice. A resolution from any of them, asking TRWD to protect municipal supply over industrial sales, would carry serious weight.
Henderson County's Commissioners Court went on record on May 12, 2026. The Tarrant County Commissioners Court can adopt a parallel resolution, protecting the water supply its own residents paid to build.
The lake is in Henderson County. The water bill, the bonds, and the ballot box are in Tarrant County. This fight belongs to both ends of the pipeline. Save Cedar Creek Lake coalition
Whether you fish Cedar Creek on weekends or just drink from your Fort Worth tap, the same five million gallons a day are on the table. Add your name.