An intensive process to plan out the maximum depletion of aquifers over the next half-century has been completed just ahead of the Sept. 1 deadline.

"It's done," said Robert Mace, the deputy executive administrator of the Texas Water Development Board, the state's water development planning group, in an interview Monday afternoon. He had just received word that the last of the state's groundwater management areas had adopted 50-year plans.

But for Mace and his agency the groundwater-planning process — a new thing, mandated by the Legislature in 2005 — is not nearly done. Over the next six months, they ...