*What:* Come see Fort Wort Prairie at the Dixon Water Foundation's Bear Creek Ranch
*When:* Saturday, June 9th 10am-1pm
*Where:* 2701 Bear Creak Rd., Aledo, TX 76008

Owned by the Dixon Water Foundation, the 1700 acre Bear Creek Ranch supports deep soiled tallgrass prairie, limestone glades, and streamside forest.

TNC's Jim Eidson will talk about natural history, and Robby Tuggle, ranch manager, will talk about sustainable grazing. For more information, contact the Nature Conservancy's Jim Eidson, 903-568-4139, jeidson@TNC.ORG

COLLEGE STATION - A series of conferences for landowners wanting to know more about the bird hunting industry will be held throughout the state in June.

The meetings are designed for anyone who wants to improve bird hunting, breed birds for release and protect their birds against disease losses, said Dr. Lee Cartwright, Texas Cooperative Extension poultry science specialist.

Registration is free. Participants who pre-register will receive a free lunch.

Each meeting will be held from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. Dates and places are: June 1 in Amarillo; June 5 in Stephenville; June 7 in Overton; June 8 in Beaumont; June 13 in San Angelo; June 15 in El Paso; June 21 in Temple; and June 27 in Corpus Christi.

Topics will include:
- The Game Bird Business: Profitability and Business Models. - How to Hunt Your Property. - How to Manage Property for Wild Birds. - Planting Your Property - At What Cost? - Promoting Your Birds and Your Preserve. - Threat-Proofing Your Business.

Speakers will outline the national poultry improvement plan. A hands-on session with a disease-testing school and necropsy/bird posting health examination will also be presented. More information about locations and registration is available from Cartwright, 107 Kleberg Center, TAMU 2472, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-2472, 979-845-4319, a-cartwright@tamu.edu , or from http://gallus.tamu.edu/workshop%20proceedings/gamebirds07/gamebird%20conference%2007.pdf

To register, please click the link below, print out the registration form and mail it along with a $25 fully refundable check or cash to the address listed on the form.

http://www.saws.org/education/h2o_university/Teachers/WaterConf/index.shtml

Greg Wukasch, Education Specialist, SAWS H2O University, 210-233-3631

By Asher Price, AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF, Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Lawmakers waded through a water bill swollen with end-of-session amendments Tuesday, approving proposals to study how much water Texas should keep in its rivers to satisfy wildlife while reaching a compromise between rural and urban interests over reservoirs.

A similarly large bill was killed in 2005, and despite a two-year run-up for this legislation, it had stalled for weeks before reaching the House floor because of political tensions between the House and the Senate.

But on the last day it could get a hearing in the House, the bill's sponsor, Rep. Robert Puente, D-San Antonio, shepherded it through at least 90 proposed amendments and procedural roadblocks.

The bill calls for a scientific study of just how much water the state's rivers need to keep fish and wildlife flourishing. It also sets up a public awareness water conservation campaign.

"This represents the first time environmental concerns have been addressed," Puente said, with a look of relief on his face after defending the bill for hours. "Everyone is for water conservation, except when they have to do it. It doesn't solve all of the state's problems, but it would solve a lot of them."

A state water plan anticipates that the Colorado River basin, from Central Texas to the Gulf Coast, will grow from just over 1 million people to nearly 2.5 million by 2050. Water demand among cities will increase with their populations. The region's municipal water demand is expected to jump from 69.5 billion gallons a year in 2000 to 143 billion in 2050.

Much of the action revolved around how many East Texas reservoirs the state should build to quench the thirst of urban consumers, largely in Dallas. That city has the largest consumption of water per person per day at just over 260 gallons; San Antonio residents, by contrast, consume a tad less than 140 gallons per person per day.

The Senate version of the bill called for 19 reservoirs at a cost of more than $700 million to build. But the House stripped out at least four of the proposed sites. The exact number of reservoir sites probably will be hashed out in a conference committee between the two chambers.

In the House on Tuesday, the reservoir issue found lawmakers from water-rich East Texas squaring off against their thirsty counterparts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The rural lawmakers said the reservoir designations would rob landowners of property value and destroy the timber industry.

"We in East Texas can provide water to other arid parts of the state without destroying our industry," said Rep. Stephen Frost, D-Atlanta, citing untapped lakes in his district. Other lawmakers have suggested dredging current reservoirs or adding height to dams, to create more stored water.

The Dallas area, like much of Texas, is forecast to continue growing in population, and some Dallas lawmakers said the reservoirs were critical.

By Ben Wear, AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF, Monday, April 30, 2007

The State Auditor's Office this morning released a report challenging the validity of almost half of a purported $86 billion shortfall in Texas transportation funding over the next generation, and cautioning that the gap estimate "may not be reliable for making policy or funding decisions."

That $86 billion figure has been cited repeatedly by Texas Department of Transportation officials and some legislators as a major reason for the state's increasing need for new toll roads. The number is a compilation of estimates from local transportation planning agencies around the state that were produced at the behest of the Transportation Department.

The report said those estimates include mathematical errors and that another $36.9 billion needed for projects in metropolitan and urban regions was "undocumented" and that $8.6 billion of the overall total should not have been included because of mathematical errors and other flaws in the estimates.

"The accuracy of the estimated costs for metropolitan and urban regions cannot be determined because of the lack of supporting documentation," the 23-page report says. Mike Behrens, the Transportation Department's executive director, released a statement this morning saying that even if the shortfall is smaller, the state still has a substantial and growing problem in paying for new roads.

Behrens called the audit report "further documentation of a multi-billion dollar funding gap between the transportation system our state deserves and the one we can afford with current resources. No matter what number you choose, Texas has a big problem: more people, in more cars, driving more miles on an already congested highway system. "The State Auditor's Office has provided some good suggestions for refining the methodology to draw a clearer picture of the state's mobility needs and we are incorporating their recommendations into our future assessments."

The Austin area's contribution to that $86 billion figure is about $10 billion. Local officials associated with that estimate have said in the past that it is not an actual list of unfunded projects, but rather an estimate based on formulas of what it would take to eliminate congestion on all highways at all times, including rush hour.

The report follows another critical state auditor report, released Feb. 23, that said the Transportation Department had downplayed the potential costs of the Trans-Texas Corridor and potentially inflated expected gains for the project. The earlier audit became grist for legislators this session looking to roll back powers granted to the Transportation Department in earlier session.

Private-equity buyout funds are targeting electric power companies in deals that generate massive debt, stop the building of better plants and jack up rates. They take the profits and stick consumers with the cost.

The last time Wall Street applied its best minds to the electric power industry, they brought us Enron, brownouts and wholesale-price-gouging in California, not to mention higher electric bills.

Now, not even 10 years later, they're at it again: Private-equity buyout funds have set their sights on electric utilities. And the result will be? You guessed it, higher electric bills for you and me. As if inflation and the rising cost of oil and natural gas isn't pushing our bills up fast enough already.

You may have heard about the huge sums raised by buyout funds designed to buy public companies and take them private. These funds raised $189 billion in 2006, a record, and look like they're headed for more than $250 billion in 2007.

And you may have heard about the huge deals they've done recently, with each deal bigger than the last: $27 billion for First Data $32 billion for HCA, $38 billion for Equity Office Properties and, temporarily the biggest deal on record, $44 billion for TXU Corp Bad news all around

Other electric utilities are likely to get bids sometime in 2007. A few have already put themselves up for sale: a utility with 24 generating plants in the United States, for example, indicated on April 9 that it wouldn't mind getting a bid. And buyout funds are kicking the tires on other utilities. The buyout funds have lots of money to put to work, and utilities have the kind of big predictable cash flow that these funds like to see.

This is bad, bad news for your utility bill in the short run. In the long run, it's even worse.

In the short run, making a profit on one of these buyout deals depends, first, on "restructuring" the company so that it's more profitable than it was before the buyout. Most of the time, restructuring involves spinning off money-losing operations and outsourcing some part of operations -- and it always involves cutting jobs.

That would be bad enough in the case of a utility, since job cuts are likely to mean a decline in utility service.

But you'll wind up paying more for less service because, second, turning those small gains in corporate profits into big profits for buyout investors rests on building the buyout deal so that borrowed money, known as leverage, multiplies those relatively modest improvements in corporate earnings.

Piling on the debt

A typical buyout deal works like this. To fund its purchase of the soon-to-be-private company, the buyout fund puts up some cash -- say, 25% of the total purchase price -- and borrows the rest by issuing debt backed by the assets of the acquired company. So in buying TXU, the buyout fund might put up $11 billion in cash -- certainly not chump change -- and then sell $33 billion in TXU debt to big institutional investors to complete the purchase.

In essence, the purchased company buys itself, but the buyout fund (and its investors) gets 100% of all future profits when the company is eventually sold back to the public.

And that's not the limit of the debt load to be piled on the purchased company's balance sheet. Used to be that buyout funds waited until they dressed up a company and sold it back to public investors before they cashed out. In today's market, buyout funds have added a new wrinkle: While the company is still private, it issues a big cash dividend to the buyout investors, so those investors get part of their cash back in short order. How does the company pay for that dividend? Why, by issuing more debt, of course!

Even before the deal, TXU was carrying a big load of short-term ($1.5 billion) and long-term ($10.6 billion) debt, and paying a sizable interest bill of $784 million in 2006. Adding an additional $33 billion or so in debt will run that interest bill significantly higher. And that additional debt load will put pressure on the company's credit rating, already a relatively low BB from Standard & Poor's.

Who pays? Customers

That BB rating is already one notch below what's called "investment grade," meaning that the big debt-rating agencies such as Standard & Poor's, Moody's and Fitch think there's a significant chance that this debt will go into default and that the borrower won't be able to pay. About 1.2% of BB grade debt (or Ba in Moody's system) went into default within a year of rating, according to Moody's, in the period 1970 through 2001. Down one notch, the historical default rate climbs to 6.53%.

Think investors might want TXU to pay more interest on all that new -- and old -- debt to make up for the added risk posed by the post-buyout debt load? And who's going to pay the interest on all that borrowing? The utility's customers.

Video on MSN Money
Buyout boom fear

The buyout boom has loaded up corporate balance sheets with debt just as the era of easy money is ending. Even if interest rates don't go up, tougher loan standards mean it could get harder to finance these deals, says MSN Money's Jim Jubak.

Texas residential customers already pay some of the highest prices for electricity in the country. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a residential customer in Texas paid an average rate of 12.09 cents per kilowatt-hour. Only the Northeast and California pay higher rates.

Exploiting the inefficiencies

Which is odd, when you think about it, because TXU generates most of its electricity from coal, and coal is one of the cheapest ways to produce electricity. In the bad old days before utility deregulation in Texas, state regulators would have required TXU to sell its electricity at cost plus a profit set by the regulators. But thanks to energy deregulation in Texas, the "free" market sets the price of electricity, and the free market price is based on the much higher cost of generating electricity from natural gas.

If it were easy to ship electricity from one place to another, that price discrepancy wouldn't exist. Cheaper coal-based electricity from, say, Wyoming would enter the state when the Texas market demanded it and keep prices low. But the national electricity grid has bottlenecks that prevent low-cost out-of-state electricity from meeting Texas demand.

Buyouts like that of TXU work only because of inefficiencies like this, and in the long run, buyout firms have an interest in perpetuating these inefficiencies so that local prices stay high.

New plants canceled

The long-run logic of utility buyouts leads to lower investment in power lines that would eliminate price differences like those that cost consumers money in Texas (and California and the Northeast). And it leads to lower investment in new power plants, since spending cash on new, more efficient plants cuts the utility cash flow so necessary to paying all that post-buyout debt.

So it's no coincidence that immediately after the announcement of the buyout, TXU said it would cancel eight of the 11 coal-burning power plants that it had planned to build. (That also let the buyout funds score big points with environmental groups that had been fighting TXU on its plans.) The additional power from the three plants should meet near-term increases in demand for electricity and avoid the kind of brownouts that bring regulators out in force. And canceling the plants would conserve cash and keep Texas prices high.

There's not a whole lot of risk in the TXU deal for the buyout funds, because they've done this one before in Texas, and it turned out very well indeed for them. In 2004, buyout funds Texas Pacific and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the same funds that are leading the TXU buyout, bought Texas Genco, another Texas utility with low generating costs. They flipped that company for a $2 billion profit in about a year.

Higher electricity bills

And, unfortunately for consumers of electricity around the country, the model isn't limited to Texas. It will work anyplace where the national grid has a bottleneck and where a utility can exploit a price inefficiency. For example, to get ready to market itself to buyout funds, Mirant has been selling off its high-cost natural-gas-powered generating plants in the Midwest. That would leave the company with three main markets, the Mid-Atlantic, the Northeast and California, all with high electricity costs and grid bottlenecks and with a generating capacity dominated by coal-fueled power plants.

Ordinarily, I have nothing against investors or companies that exploit pricing inefficiencies in the market. That is, after all, one way that the market eliminates these inefficiencies over time. But in this case, the buyout deals for utilities in these markets will make the inefficiencies worse. The newly private utilities will have no incentive to build new transmission lines to improve the national grid, and they will have no incentive to spend capital on building new, less-polluting and more efficient power plants to meet projected demand, beyond the minimum required to keep regulators on the sidelines.

The bottom line of these deals is high profits for buyout funds and their investors and higher electricity prices for the rest of us.

E-mail Jim Jubak at jjmail@microsoft.com.
At the time of publication, Jim Jubak did not own or control shares of any of the equities mentioned in this column. He did not own short positions in any stock mentioned in this column.

SEGUIN - A Guadalupe County commissioner thinks he has found a novel way to provide hundreds of acre-feet of water to Schertz and Seguin residents and give county government a new source of revenue.

If the county moves forward with the idea, it could be a groundbreaking option for Texas counties, cities and municipal utility districts to gain pumping rights from groundwater districts and make money by leasing the water rights for property the county owns, including long stretches of county roads.

The south side of Guadalupe County is over the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer, and the Guadalupe County Groundwater Conservation District is responsible for granting pumping rights for that water. The district's rules award pumping rights based upon the amount of land the applicant owns and the thickness of the saturated sands in the aquifer below that land.

County Commissioner Jim Wolverton recently realized the county itself owns a lot of land over the aquifer in the form of county roads. He conservatively estimated that the county's right-of-way ownership in the district adds up to more than 1,400 acres. That could entitle the county to more than 350 acre-feet a year of pumping rights, said Kelly McDermott, geographic information systems analyst for the groundwater district. Assuming an average aquifer thickness of 300 feet below the county roads, the county could get the right to pump about one-fourth of an acre-foot of water per year for every acre of right of way it owns, she said.

McDermott said she spoke to a representative of the Guadalupe County Road Department on Wednesday and will work with the department to determine how much water the county has the right to pump.

"I don't think we have a problem with that," she said. "If the county owns the land, it owns the pumping rights. If they can come up with a number we can verify, who's to say they can't pump?"

Wolverton said he would like to lease those pumping rights to the Schertz-Seguin Local Government Corp., an entity set up by the two cities that drilled eight wells in Gonzales County and built a 50-mile pipeline to bring almost 13,000-acre-feet of water annually to Guadalupe County.

Wolverton said the water rights should lease for about $92 an acre-foot, or about $32,000 a year or more, depending on the amount of right of way the county owns and the amount of pumping rights that total of land gives the county.

"I can't find anything in the law that says the county does not have the authority to do this," Wolverton said. "I'd like the county to look into this. It would benefit both the cities. They need water. The water is there and somebody is going to get paid for it." The Commissioners Court reached a consensus Tuesday to research the issue further. Such a plan would not work in Bexar County or other counties that are part of the Edwards Aquifer Authority, which does not award pumping rights based upon the amount of land an applicant owns.

"It sounds like he's come up with something outside the box," said Doug Miller, chairman of the EAA board of directors and a member of the South Central Texas Regional Water Planning Group. "That just might work."

Miller said the move is not necessarily a cause for alarm, but it bears watching. "Somebody may challenge it, or maybe not, and then you'll have a precedent," Miller said. "If it works for Guadalupe County, you could see a lot of other public entities, in districts with rules like that, do the same thing."

Tony Wilenchik, a Schertz city councilman, said the prospect of adding to the city water supply constitutes "a win-win situation for Schertz, Seguin and the county."

The neighboring Gonzales County Underground Water Conservation District also awards pumping permits based on the amount of land owned, said Manager Barry Miller.

"That's an interesting scheme, a very interesting concept," he said of Wolverton's idea. "It's not addressed in the rules of our district."

He said district rules require permitted wells to be drilled at least 500 feet from the property line, which could preclude drilling a well on a county road right of way. But the county could feasibly buy a parcel of land on a county road and consider that parcel and all the roads in the district as one contiguous parcel.

Small wells, including those used by homeowners, do not need to be permitted in the Guadalupe County district.

Texas Commission on Environmental Quality spokeswoman Andrea Morrow said she checked with lawyers and staff at the commission and no one had heard of another county that has claimed pumping rights based on ownership of rights of way in a groundwater conservation district.

"We can't say definitively that no other counties have done this, but we don't know of any," she said.

Texas has 80 such groundwater districts. Some, like the Guadalupe County district, award pumping rights based on land ownership. Others base it on historical use, rate of withdrawal, prevention of harm to neighboring wells or other rules.

The Edwards Aquifer Authority bases its permits on historical use and requires proportionate reduction in pumping during times of drought.

By MARK BABINECK, Houston Chronicle, May 14, 2007

DIBOLL - Conservationists have a big problem with Temple-Inland's stewardship of 1.1 million or so acres of East Texas timberland: They don't want it to end.

They didn't get a vote in the boardroom, though, and the company indeed has hung the "for sale" sign on its forest holdings, cajoled by a billionaire investor into joining a land-divestment trend within the industry.

The result of Temple-Inland's decision in February to split three ways and relinquish its trees has been rampant uncertainty, both for the forests the company has harvested, planted and protected for more than a century and people who have long depended on them.

Charlotte Temple, former company director and great-granddaughter of founder T.L.L. Temple, boiled it down at the annual stockholders' meeting in Diboll earlier this month.

"What assurances do we have that the timberlands will be cared for?" she asked. Kenneth Jastrow, chairman and chief executive, answered that the company would press for certain conservation and forest management commitments in its sales agreements, but he added that details of negotiations were confidential.

"That's something I sort of wondered about," said Bruce Drury, president of the Big Thicket Association. "It's like deed restrictions on a housing development. I don't know that you can do a deed restriction of some sort on forest property. It's tenuous, I think."

Land grab

Conservationists are scrambling to get a piece themselves, particularly about 150,000 acres abutting the Big Thicket National Preserve and a collection of "distinctive sites" that Temple-Inland has nurtured over the years. Until the deals are done though, it's impossible to predict who will buy them or what will become of the land.

Big Thicket protectors, who have fought for decades to establish and expand the preserve, are worried about the future of the tracts and excited about the possibility of gaining control of them.

"It's a big opportunity, a big challenge for Texans to step up to the plate and do this right," said Andy Jones, director of The Conservation Fund's office in Austin. He cautioned that demand is hot for timberlands but conservationists have "a fighting chance."

A big reason for optimism among conservationists is that investor Carl Icahn, who demanded the changes, dropped his fight for company control once the current management decided on Feb. 26 to break up the conglomerate structure and sell the land. That leaves the details up to Temple-Inland, which has pleased conservationists by committing to sustainable forestry, conserving resources, reducing pollution, setting aside sensitive or unique sites and creating buffer zones near federally protected lands.

Jastrow won't say much about the pending sale but has hinted that places like the Silky Camellia Colony in Newton County, the Naconiche Bog in Rusk County and the state champion Arkansas oak in Jasper County won't give way to spec homes or sawmills. (The company won't release a map of its current holdings for proprietary reasons.)

"Those issues are at the forefront and first on our minds in the sale process," said Jastrow, although he'll have to balance that with the company's mantra of "maximizing shareholder value."

Diboll's future

Also at stake is a major cog of the East Texas economy, particularly Diboll's. The town of about 5,500 was owned entirely by Temple-Inland from its founding on T.L.L. Temple's first 7,000 acres in 1894 until the 1950s, when grandson Arthur Temple Jr. decided to let homeownership and free enterprise bloom.

Little Diboll stood alongside New York, Chicago and Houston as hometowns to Fortune 500 companies until Temple-Inland moved its management suite to Austin in 2000, leaving its operational offices behind. Then Arthur Temple Jr., the beloved local father figure who took the company to new heights, died last spring at age 86.

Now Diboll is dealing with the same uncertainty as the conservationists. Jastrow maintains the new companies will give workers unprecedented opportunities to grow and notes Temple-Inland just spent $3 million renovating its main building in Diboll.

"What happens with Temple-Inland affects Diboll one way or another," City Manager Kenneth Williams said. "We tend to look at it optimistically."

To appease Icahn and other shareholders, Temple-Inland is spinning off its Guaranty Bank financial business and its Forestar Real Estate Group, which develops land on vast acreage concentrated in Georgia. The new Temple-Inland will concentrate on forest products, like boxes and lumber, after selling about 1.8 million total acres across the South.

The moves will happen by the end of 2007, Jastrow said.

The sale is simple math, said Morgan Stanley timber company analyst Edings Thibault. A combination of slashed capital gains taxes on forest sales, a code that gives nonintegrated timberland owners a tax advantage and healthy land demand makes it difficult for companies like Temple-Inland not to sell.

The sale has caused consternation at the Sierra Club, which would like to see sensitive areas bought by conservationists and eventually sold to the U.S. government, which could increase the Big Thicket National Preserve by 150 percent to about 250,000 acres. Big Thicket preservationists say previous large sell-offs by International Paper and Louisiana-Pacific have resulted in some less-than-optimal uses, including an ugly logging road that popped up near the preserve's visitors' center.

mark.babineck@chron.com

By Shonda Novak, AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF, Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Touting it as the "crown jewel of the Texas Hill Country," a South Carolina company has purchased more than 21,000 acres on Lake Buchanan's northeastern shore in what might be the largest single land acquisition in Central Texas in modern history.

Copper Station Properties, based in Beaufort, S.C., acquired 21,305 acres of the 27,000-acre Goodrich Ranch in January for an undisclosed price, said John Ed Stepan, a real estate agent with Ranch Investments & Associates who represented the Goodrich family in the sale.

John Ed Stepan Real estate agent says Goodrich sale drew multiple offers.

Copper Station has given the land a new name, Clearwater Ranch, and is selling it off in 11 parcels with a total asking price of about $125 million. The most expensive piece is 1,800 acres listed for $26 million.

The sale comes as development presses deeper into the Hill Country, spurred in part by increased demand from retirees and people looking for vacation homes.

Earlier this year, Austin developers launched plans for Rancho San Miguel, a 6,000-home development in Blanco County.

Developers are marketing waterfront and hilltop lots on the tract west of Burnet for up to $400,000 at the Peninsula on Lake Buchanan, where owners will have access to a private marina.

In addition to the Hill Country's beauty, favorable land values are luring potential buyers, Stepan said.

Stepan said there were multiple offers when the Goodrich Ranch went on the market for 45 days last spring. Copper Station made the best offer, but Stepan wouldn't disclose the price, citing a confidentiality agreement.

A 1,000-acre parcel on the west side of Lake Buchanan sold for about $8 million last year.

Charles Heimsath, an Austin-based real estate consultant, said land on the eastern shore generally is more valuable because it's more accessible to Austin and the water is deeper.

Heimsath said the property could draw interest from people looking for small ranches, which are difficult to find.

Assuming the subdivided parcels are priced reasonably, Heimsath said, "there will definitely be a market for that type of Hill Country ranch. It all depends on price."

With a deep water cove that makes it ideal for a marina, lake views and Beaver Creek running through it, the priciest parcel of Clearwater Ranch would lend itself to an upscale master-planned residential golf course community for retirees and second-home owners, Stepan said.

The parcels are being widely marketed nationally, and developers, investment groups and wealthy individuals have expressed interest, he said.

The land, 70 miles northwest of Austin in Burnet County, has Hill Country and waterfront views, limestone canyons, 21 miles of spring-fed creeks and abundant wildlife.

The land is about 33 square miles, with 11 miles of frontage on the Colorado River and Lake Buchanan.

Stepan said he thinks it could be the largest land sale, size-wise, in the region, but some commercial deals in Austin have brought more money per acre.

Copper Station officials did not return calls.

The company was formed to buy, subdivide and resell large tracts of land, much of which hasn't been available for generations, for recreational, development and timber investment purposes, according to its Web site.

The site says the company has bought more than 150,000 acres in Texas and seven other states.

For much of the 70 years the Goodrich family owned the land, it was a working cattle ranch, Stepan said.

Family members have kept about 6,000 acres and are retaining rights to the Goodrich Ranch name.

Stepan said he thinks the Clearwater parcels will be sold in 18 to 24 months.

"There are people who call us from out of state weekly," he said. "It's probably the highest level of interest we've ever seen in a piece of land."

snovak@statesman.com; 445-3856

Some of the plants in Central and South Texas gardens and landscapes that seem beautiful at first glance show an ugly side when they escape into the wild. These dangerous invasive species out-compete native plants for resources such as light and water. Unless controlled, their seeds can be spread by birds, wind and water runoff, and they can completely replace the native flora in places far from town.

What makes invasive species dangerous is that their aggressive natures contribute to the decline of 46 percent of the imperiled or endangered species in the United States. Their cost to the national economy has been estimated as high as $137 billion per year, and that cost is increasing. Invasive species cause losses in agriculture, forestry and fisheries, clogging waterways and fueling fires.

To preserve our native Texas plants and the wildlife that depends on them, The Nature Conservancy, which conserves land for native plants and animals, recommends that gardeners avoid certain plants at all costs. As part of its Global Invasive Species Initiative The Nature Conservancy is working to control these aggressive invaders through a combination of prevention, restoration, research and outreach in Texas and around the world.

"Chinese tallow, ligustrum and water hyacinth are examples of invasive species that wreak havoc in the wild and are known by many gardeners as less than desirable for their aggressive natures and other problematic traits," said Bill Carr, a botanist with the Conservancy's Texas Program.

"On the other hand, native bigtooth maples and red oaks provide gorgeous fall color, yaupon holly is a graceful, screening shrub with red berries that attract birds, and pickerelweed and while water lily bloom beautifully in garden ponds. These plants won't cause constant messes, or spring up unwanted all over the yard or smother the life out of your pond like Chinese tallow, ligustrum and water hyacinth."

Not all non-native garden plants are troublesome, Carr notes. Crape myrtle, originally a resident of western Asia, has been in cultivation in San Antonio and Austin for more than a century, yet it only rarely escapes and is never a true threat to native species. Similarly, oleander is almost never found in the wild, despite its abundance in regional gardens and landscapes, he said.

Some garden species that behave badly in other regions don't seem to cause problems in Central and South Texas. Daffodils, for example, colonize roadsides in some parts of East Texas but seldom escape into the shallow soils and dry climates of San Antonio and Austin, Carr said.

"Native Texas plants and non-invasive, non-native plants that are well-adapted to our climate and soils can save both water and headaches for homeowners and gardeners, and can be as spectacularly handsome in the landscape as any invasive species," he said. Area residents have more choices than ever before when planning and installing a gardens and landscapes. Hundreds of plant species are now available through local nurseries. Thanks to this industry, it is easy to avoid planting invasive plants by using species native to the region, or by selecting among the many non-native species that are not known to be a threat to natural vegetation beyond the garden.

The http://www.nature.org/wherewework/northamerica/states/texas/files/badgoodspeciestable.pdf attached table shows the most dangerous invasive plant species for Central and South Texas and offers some good non-invasive alternatives. The native and well-adapted plants shown here represent only a few of the many and varied choices available. Excellent resources for learning more about invasive plants and discovering the joys of well-adapted non-invasive species may be found on the internet. Here are some websites Carr recommends:

• Invasive plants to avoid, Austin City Invasive plants to avoid, Austin City Connection: http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/growgreen/invasive.htm
• Invasive species that should be avoided, Texas Wildscapes, Texas Parks & Wildlife Department: http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/huntwild/wild/wildscapes/guidance/plants/invasives
• San Antonio Water System's Watersavers Plant List: http://www.saws.org/conservation/h2ome/landscape/plantlist.cfm
• Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center: http://www.wildflower.org
• Native Plant Society of Texas: http://www.npsot.org
• Nuisance aquatic vegetation, Texas Parks & Wildlife Department: http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/landwater/water/environconcerns/nuisance_plants
• San Antonio Botanical Garden: http://www.sabot.org
• The Global Invasive Species Initiative, The Nature Conservancy: http://www.nature.org/initiatives/invasivespecies
• Texas Aquatic Plant Management Society: http://www.tapms.org

1. Verify that the plants you are buying for your yard or garden are not invasive. Replace invasive plants in your garden with non-invasive alternatives. Ask your local nursery staff for help in identifying invasive plants.
2. When boating, clean your boat thoroughly before transporting it to a different body of water.
3. Clean your boots before you hike in a new area to get rid of hitchhiking weed seeds and pathogens.
4. Don't "pack a pest" when traveling. Fruits and vegetables, plants, insects and animals can carry pests or become invasive themselves.
5. Don't release aquarium fish and plants, live bait or other exotic animals into the wild.
6. Volunteer at your local park, refuge or other wildlife area to help remove invasive species. Help educate others about the threat.