Valentine out for now; contractors set sights on Presidio
As the border wall nears reality in the Big Bend, contractors are scrambling to find places to house the hundreds of workers needed to bring President Trump’s dream of a coast-to-coast wall to fruition. Both the City of Valentine and the City of Presidio have been approached by companies interested in utility hookups for large “man camps,” temporary worker housing that would require these small, isolated municipalities to provide water and wastewater service for RV parks of up to 500 people.
About two weeks ago, a representative from Frontier Development called Jeff Davis County Commissioner Albert Miller to inquire about the state of the water system in the tiny town of Valentine. Frontier did not have any specific details for Miller about the exact plans for the project, but wanted to get the lay of the land.
Miller kept an open mind, knowing that the town’s dwindling population was desperate for any kind of economic activity, but he had major concerns. Like many local officials, Miller wears multiple hats to keep his community running and also oversees the municipal water supply, which is in critical condition. He’s been working for more than 20 years to try to help the community forge a new path forward. “My biggest concern is that we don’t have any redundancy,” he explained. “We’re supplying with one well. When that well goes down, we might not have water for a day and a half, sometimes longer than that.”
The next step was to alert Summer Webb, the mayor of Valentine. Webb has served in her role for around seven years as the head of a tiny town council with just three votes. Though no official application had been presented to the city, she decided to call a meeting to give locals a chance to gather and discuss the issue. “I just feel very strongly that this is the kind of thing the community needs to be aware of, so that they’re prepared for it,” Webb told Big Bend Sentinel.
On Monday night, a standing-room-only crowd of close to 100 people—more than the population of Valentine proper—packed the community center. Yolanda Alvarado, who manages a ranch in the path of the border wall and whose children go to school in Valentine, was the first to speak. “This isn’t just a little fence,” Alvarado said. “This is 300 men coming in, it’s 18-wheelers and all the fuel they’re going to haul. There’s going to be traffic and we’re going to need law enforcement, which is very limited here. I’m afraid for my kids and their safety.”
Carol Brewer, a nurse at the Davis Mountain Clinic in Fort Davis, presented her findings from research she’d done into the impact of man camps on small, rural communities, citing studies conducted by the University of Colorado at Boulder on the correlation between gender-based violence and the Bakken oilfield boom in North Dakota. “It shows that communities experiencing a sudden influx of transient, predominantly male workers often see higher rates of violent crime, sexual assault and other serious offenses,” Brewer explained. “The research shows that violence against women can increase between 30-70%, and there’s long-term ramifications to that—it affects not just the victims, but the victims’ families and the victims’ community.”
The handful of out-of-towners who signed up to address Mayor Webb and Councilmembers Gabriella Gillard and Danny Garcia emphasized how precarious and interconnected the region’s communities are, particularly if wall construction were to impact tourism, the region’s number one economic driver. “It’s not just the people of Valentine that are affected,” said Michael Ryan, a former National Park Service river ranger and resident of Terlingua. “There will be many people affected,”
Deirdre Hisler, a Presidio County Commissioner, offered assistance in helping Valentine find alternative solutions to the community’s looming water crisis. “We don’t want the solution to your water problem to become a problem for us down by the Rio Grande,” she said.
Jeff Davis County Judge Curtis Evans implored the people of Valentine not to shoot the messenger. “These are not y’all’s enemies—they need your support, not your pushback,” he cautioned as the crowd got restless.
Despite a few tense moments during the meeting, Mayor Webb felt it was ultimately a positive experience that she hoped inspired locals to be more involved in their government. “It got people’s attention,” she said. “I wish this many people cared about the fact that we’ve had water issues for years, but hopefully this raised awareness that there’s other things happening in town we would love to have the community be a part of.”
Reached by phone on Friday afternoon, Rusty Wallace of Frontier Development emphasized that the company does not have a contract to work on the border wall. For about six years, Wallace has worked with the federal government to modernize and improve the region’s roads so that law enforcement and first responders can safely access the most remote stretches of the border. “Frontier Development is doing nothing more than what we’ve already been doing, which is creating road access for Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security for safety reasons,” he explained.
“A silent killer”
Meanwhile, in the City of Presidio, the city’s tango with potential man camp operators has only just begun. In advance of the city’s March 17 City Council meeting, former City Attorney Rod Ponton and representatives for Landgraf, Crutcher and Associates—an engineering firm out of Odessa—had inquired about water and wastewater hookups for a pair of 250-pad RV sites within the city’s “extra-territorial jurisdiction,.” or ETJ. (At press time, the city had not yet fulfilled a Texas Public Information Act request for communications with Landgraf; Ponton declined to comment on what he characterized as a private business matter.)
Behind the scenes, Presidio Municipal Development District (PMDD) Executive Director John Kennedy has been pleading with the federal government to send more information about the border wall project and its potential impacts to the city of Presidio. In letters addressed to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Army Corps of Engineers and the International Water and Boundary Commission, Kennedy demanded proof that the federal government was doing its due diligence in considering potential impacts to the city’s flood-prevention infrastructure and soon-to-reopen rail port of entry. “The people of Presidio lived through a flood [in 2008] that almost destroyed this community,” Kennedy wrote in a press release. “The federal government rebuilt that levee. It is hard to understand how a different arm of that same government can now propose to build on top of it without so much as an engineering review — unless you believe that a waiver designed for border security also waives the laws of physics.”
At a Presidio Municipal Development District (PMDD) meeting on April 1, Kennedy said that CBP and the IBWC had acknowledged receipt of this letter but had not provided a substantive response. The district—which administers a modest tax base designed to fund economic development projects —then turned to a discussion of potential impacts the two 250-pad man camps could have on the community.
Kennedy said that Barnard Construction—the company with contracts to build road and wall infrastructure in Hudspeth, Jeff Davis and far Northwestern Presidio County—had originally approached PMDD about carving off a slice of the city’s Industrial Park for 500 RV pads, but that the board had to consider the wall’s long-term economic impact before trying to make a quick buck. “The Industrial Park is our principal economic development asset,” he explained. “We’re not going to let anything roll through here without a little more assurance than what we have, which is just the government telling us, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ A lot of engineering has been done over the years [concerning the levee system], and I can’t tell if there’s been a lick of engineering done in the past few months over this border wall.”
Presidio businessman Carlos Nieto echoed Kennedy’s concerns about the apparent lack of serious hydrological study given to the border wall project, and was concerned about the status of flood-mitigation infrastructure on Cibolo Creek, which passes through Presidio. “None of us were born the last time Cibolo really flooded,” he said. “It could take out the entire city of Presidio—Cibolo is a silent killer;, it’s not going to give you notice.”
