Fawn Elizabeth Zion, founder of the East Texas Legacy Coalition

Why she fights

There’s an old line, usually pinned on Mark Twain, who probably never said it: whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting over. Out here it isn’t a saying. It’s a job description.

Fawn’s family has been in Texas for seven generations. In Deep East Texas, families drink from their own wells, and most of that water comes out of the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer under the pines.

In early 2026, word got out about a $1 billion AI data center on more than 1,000 acres of the old Southland Paper Mill site outside Lufkin. The City said it’d use about 500 gallons of water a day, roughly what three houses use, for a campus its developer says will grow to 2.1 gigawatts. Bless their hearts. Fawn started asking the questions the paperwork skipped: how much water, from where, and who decided.

She founded the East Texas Legacy Coalition to get those answers in writing and put them where y’all can see them.

She’s run businesses since she was 19, co-owns Zion Auto Glass in Lufkin, and is raising three kids, which is its own kind of public service.

She’s also a self-taught systems architect. When nobody would build the public a dashboard, she built one. Through her company, Grail Systems, she designed and built the coalition’s public tools, including the Aquifer Defense Grid and the records request tracker.

My name’s Fawn Zion. I’m the founder of the East Texas Legacy Coalition and the co-owner of Zion Auto Glass in Lufkin, Texas. I’m a wife, a mother of three, as well as a seventh-generation Texan.

I want to start by addressing the standard defense, so we can focus on the actual problem. I know you will say the TWDB does not issue water well permits, and that pumping is the jurisdiction of local groundwater districts. But you control the blueprint, and you control the funding.

If you include hyper-scale corporate extraction in this State Water Plan as a recommended strategy, you legitimize it. You cannot offer state financial backing for the infrastructure that drains our aquifer and then claim you have no jurisdiction over the consequences.

I’m here today because the 2027 State Water Plan, as currently drafted, is planning for a future that ignores reality. It fails to establish a clear priority between people and corporations competing for the same water, and it severely underestimates the hyper-scale water demands of incoming data centers and industrial projects.

We’re often told that Texas operates on the Rule of Capture, that leasing water to a developer is a private property right. But the Rule of Capture was built to protect a rancher watering his herd. It wasn’t built for a corporation pumping millions of gallons a day to cool servers. When one industrial site extracts at a scale that drains the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer for miles around, they aren’t exercising their property rights. They are destroying the property rights of every family surrounding them.

The draft plan warns of economic damage if we don’t develop new water strategies. But I have to ask: whose economy?

A hyper-scale data center provides very few permanent local jobs. The real economic damage happens when local farmers, families, and businesses go dry to subsidize a tech company’s utility bill.

We’ve been told that if we do not find a use for our water, the state will. Well… we ARE using our water. We’re using it by keeping it in the ground, sustaining private wells, agriculture, and the ecosystems that keep East Texas livable.

That is the highest use.

The 2027 State Water Plan must explicitly state that the water needs of Texas people take priority over corporate extraction projects. Not as preference. As policy. As law.

The board has the authority to draw this line right now. Once these projects are baked into the state plan and funded, that authority is gone.

I am asking you to use it.

Thank you.

The East Texas Dry-Cooling Mandate

Fawn drafted the East Texas Dry-Cooling Mandate for ETLC on Aug. 28, 2026. Its argument fits on a feed-store receipt: the technology to cool power plants and data centers without boiling off groundwater already exists, so the companies can pay for it instead of East Texas paying with its aquifer.

“East Texas will not serve as a sacrificial resource colony for this expansion.”From the directive

It calls for three requirements on new infrastructure permits:

New gas-fired power plants in the Carrizo-Wilcox footprint must use air-cooled condensers, also called dry cooling.
New data centers larger than 5 megawatts must use closed-loop or direct-to-chip cooling, with no evaporative cooling on local groundwater.
Companies eat the small efficiency loss on hot summer days. That’s the price of doing business somewhere the water’s worth fighting over.

Read the full directive

The Texas Corporate Power Reset Act

A draft bill with a memo to the Texas Legislature. Instead of picking a free-speech fight the memo says the state would lose in federal court, it goes after the corporate charter. Texas creates these companies, so Texas gets to say which powers they don’t have, and spending company money on Texas elections would be one of them. Break the rule and the company loses its right to do business here.

Read the memo and bill

Fawn Elizabeth Zion

Why she fights

May 27, 2026: Austin

What changed

Then the state blinked.

The door most folks walked right past

Her proposals

The East Texas Dry-Cooling Mandate

The Texas Corporate Power Reset Act

The fight so far

In the press

The receipts

Do this in your town