A Letter from the Devils River Conservancy’s Executive Director
Dear Friends of the Devils River,
Last Friday, the Public Utility Commission of Texas approved the Howard–Solstice 765-kV transmission line and selected a modified version of Route 4.
Note: The PUC’s modification does not change the original Route 4 west of Uvalde.
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For the Devils River Conservancy, this moment brings mixed emotions.
From the beginning, our primary goal was clear: protect the Devils River itself and defend the extraordinary conservation corridor that surrounds it—a landscape built not by chance or accident, but through more than three decades of commitment and sacrifice by private landowners, conservation organizations, state agencies, and partners who chose to protect this place for future generations.
On that fundamental objective, we succeeded.
The approved route avoids a direct crossing of the Devils River and protects the heart of the conservation corridor we fought to safeguard. We also successfully defended the Skyline Ranch conservation easement from an alternative route that would have cut directly through an important piece of that landscape.
Just as critically, the Devils River and its conservation corridor were specifically recognized during this proceeding as a “community value” worthy of consideration in transmission routing. That matters.
“Community values” can be an abstract concept in these proceedings. In this case, however, the decades of conservation investment surrounding the Devils River were placed squarely into the record and recognized as something that should influence infrastructure decisions. We appreciate AEP Texas and CPS Energy, the administrative law judges at the State Office of Administrative Hearings, and ultimately the Public Utility Commission for getting that key point right.
We are also grateful to Representative Eddie Morales, Senator Gutierrez, and the Val Verde County Commissioners Court for their leadership and advocacy on behalf of the Devils River, local communities, and affected landowners throughout this process.
But protecting the river does not mean we believe the process that produced this decision was adequate or fair.
We do not.
The Howard–Solstice proceeding, and the larger wave of 765-kV transmission cases moving across Texas, placed an extraordinary burden on private landowners. Individuals and families were expected to understand, respond to, and meaningfully participate in enormously complex proceedings on compressed timelines while facing applicants supported by teams of attorneys, engineers, consultants, and technical experts.
For many landowners, meaningful participation required enormous amounts of their own time, money, and emotional energy simply to have a seat at the table.
At times, we believe that imbalance crossed the line from merely burdensome into a process that was exploitative of private landowners. And that makes the Commission’s decision to move forward particularly difficult to understand.
By the time these decisions reached the PUCT, concerns about the process were hardly isolated to a handful of unhappy landowners. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Attorney General Ken Paxton, legislative leaders, dozens of lawmakers, local governments, conservation organizations, and thousands of Texans had raised concerns or called for delay, denial, or reform. Legislative hearings exposed serious questions about notice, timelines, transparency, property rights, and whether rules developed for traditional transmission projects were adequate for infrastructure being advanced at this unprecedented scale and pace. In another of these 765-kV proceedings, administrative law judges even recommended that the Commission deny the certificate before it. Yet the larger buildout continued moving forward.
Many of these voices consistently asked that Texas not abandon its responsibility to build necessary infrastructure. It was much more reasonable: allow the Legislature—only months away from returning to Austin—to examine what these cases had exposed and improve the rules before decisions with permanent consequences were made.
That did not happen.
Texas should not continually govern from behind—improving protections only after irreversible decisions have already been made and after individual Texans have absorbed the consequences. Nor can we accept a system in which agencies point to the Legislature, lawmakers point to regulators, utilities point to statutory mandates, and everyone explains why someone else is ultimately responsible. Texans deserve leadership that can balance infrastructure needs with private property rights, conservation, transparency, and meaningful due process. Those principles are not mutually exclusive.
I also want to be clear about something else: while DRC worked hard throughout this process, we did not do this alone.
The Hill Country Preservation Coalition provided extraordinary leadership and partnership throughout this fight, bringing together landowners and communities across an enormous landscape and ensuring their voices could not easily be ignored.
I am especially grateful to attorney Eric Allmon and his team, whose significant legal and technical efforts contributed strongly to the defense of the Hill Country and Devils River regions throughout the contested-case process. Their work helped ensure that rivers, aquifer recharge areas, conservation lands, sensitive ecosystems, and community values received serious consideration in the record. The outcome could have been substantially worse without that representation.
Most importantly, I want to recognize the landowners. Some of the people who helped create the very conservation legacy we celebrate along the Devils River will now live with this transmission line on or near their properties. Other families across the route will see multigenerational ranches, homes, views, wildlife habitat, and working lands permanently changed.
Successfully shielding the river does not diminish their sacrifice. And our responsibility to them did not end with Friday’s vote.
DRC will continue watching the Howard–Solstice project closely, but our work is now shifting toward what comes next: helping affected landowners understand opportunities for property-scale siting, mitigation, restoration, erosion control, habitat protection, and other practices that may reduce construction impacts. We have already begun conversations with partners, including The Conservation Fund, about bringing additional expertise and resources to that work.
We will also continue advocating for reforms when the Texas Legislature returns. Texas needs infrastructure. Texas also needs private landowners. It needs intact watersheds, working lands, wildlife habitat, and communities willing to conserve places long before the state realizes how valuable those places have become. A system worthy of Texas should be able to protect all those things at the same time.
The Devils River survived this fight because a remarkable community stood together for it. For that, I am deeply grateful.
And for the landowners who will bear the consequences of the decision that was made, our work is not finished.
Romey Swanson
Executive Director
Devils River Conservancy