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Bob Burleson [00:00:01] When Governor Preston Smith appointed me to the Parks and Wildlife Commission, my appointment was opposed by, seriously opposed, in the, because the Senate, in Texas, must, by a certain margin, confirm a governor, a gubernatorial appointee to the Parks and Wildlife Commission. When I was appointed, I was opposed by, because of my conservation leanings, I was opposed by the shell dredging industry out of, out of the Houston area.

Bob Burleson [00:00:38] Most people today don't really know what shell dredging was, but but for nearly 100 hundred years, dredges, large floating dredges, had been digging oyster reefs out of the bays and estuaries of Texas and using them for two things.

Bob Burleson [00:00:54] One is it is a raw ingredient for Portland cement. There are large cement factories down on the coast near Houston, for example. And secondly, they were using them for basically road gravel and fill material, on county roads and city roads and subdivisions and things like that.

Bob Burleson [00:01:13] All of that was a dredge, not only destroyed by simply a huge rolling wheel that dug up the buried or fossilized oyster reefs. But the tremendous damage of it all or destroyed, whatever it dug. The tremendous damage was done by siltation because all of the sediment that was stirred up off the, off the bottom of the bay or the estuary by these dredges then floated in a dredge plume. From the air, you could see a plume sometimes three and four miles long of suspended sediments that would go behind these, they would go wherever the current took them.

Bob Burleson [00:02:00] And as they settled out, they settled on the the very environment that produced the life of the bay and estuary - the small oysters, the small shrimp, the small crabs, the juvenile fishes and it smothered them. So these dredges, for every oyster reef that they dug up, they probably destroyed dozens of others by siltation.

Bob Burleson [00:02:26] And. Additionally, they, the channel dredging creates what's called spoil. Spoil is essentially mud. It's been dug up from the bottom of a canal. Gradually they kind of filter, it filters in and begins to shallow or make the canal more shallow. So they re-dredge it iand the spoil is dumped in a pile. Those, that spoil gradually is carried out by currents. And again, it covers up the grass, the grass flats and the livelihood of the, the bays and estuaries. And of course, without the bays and estuaries, you've got no life in the Gulf at all. I mean, nearly all of these larval farms of the sea life develop in the brackish or saline waters of our bays and estuaries.

Bob Burleson [00:03:18] So, there was one particular, very powerful group called Parker Brothers in Houston. Parker Brothers was a major shell dredging industry and had, I think at that time, perhaps three dredges running. They had a, Parker Brothers had a very strong lobbyist, a former representative, I believe, named Jill Devane. Jill DeVayne was a very strong lobbyist. And the Parker, Parker Brothers spent a good bit of money opposing my nomination and my confirmation as a commissioner on the Parks and Wildlife Commission. They just recently, Senator, ex-Senator Bill Moore died - the bull of the Brazos. They had him sort of in their hip pocket. And another senator named Jim Bates from down at Batesville think he's deceased as well. They had him in their hip pocket.

Bob Burleson [00:04:20] And so the people that were working for me were Barbara Jordan and Senator Don Kennard and then my own Senator, Murray Watson from Waco. None of these people are of course in the, in the Senate anymore. Long, long, this was long ago. And of course, Barbara is deceased, and Don is working in Washington.

Bob Burleson [00:04:43] But. It came down to a very close vote. But thank goodness. Barbara Jordan and Don Kennard and some others got me confirmed.

Bob Burleson [00:04:55] Well, I mean, before long, the shell dredging issue came before the Commission. And obviously I was one of just I was just one of six commissioners at that time, at that time. The commission had six people on it. But we did studies that showed the tremendous amount of damage that was being done.

Bob Burleson [00:05:15] And even more important, although the dredgers always claimed that they were digging only fossil that is dead, oyster reefs that no longer would serve as a substrate for the growth of new oysters, the truth is they would dig through anything that was in their path, including living reefs. And they oftentimes lied about their position. When a, when a vessel is on the water dredging, you can't tell just by whether they are in a permitted section of bay floor that's been surveyed and found to have no living off oyster reefs or whether they're over in a non-permitted area. OK, well, we started triangulating on them with our Parks and Wildlife personnel down there and found out that they were, at night, oftentimes moving their position, getting into non-permitted areas, dredging live reefs and things like that.

Bob Burleson [00:06:14] Well, eventually the sum and substance of it was we made it so hard on them to operate that they shifted to an alternative supply, which is they bought a lot of land up in the Texas Hill country around New Braunfels and places like that, and started excavating limestone, shipping it by rail to the coast and using that which is environmentally far better for the bays and estuaries.

Bob Burleson [00:06:37] Again, though, like all trade-offs, there's some awful big holes dug around New Braunfels and that, you know, for quarrying. But the tradeoff we felt like was a fair one in that the bays and estuaries were in serious trouble.