Attorney General Backs East Texans Fighting to Reopen Fenced Trinity River Waterway

The Texas Attorney General’s office has sided with East Texas residents trying to reopen an old channel of the Trinity River that a private landowner fenced off in 2022, asking an appeals court to overturn a ruling that the water is not open to the public.

The state’s friend-of-the-court brief was received by the Twelfth Court of Appeals in Tyler on October 16, according to the court’s docket, and the court heard oral argument in the case on Tuesday. The brief has not been posted on the docket. According to The Texas Tribune, it argues that the trial court “erred in its conclusion that neither the Cutoff nor the old Cedar Creek are navigable.”

What is at stake

The Cutoff is the old channel of the Trinity River on the line between Henderson and Navarro counties. A levee built around 1926 severed it from the river, and a later dam turned part of it into Creslenn Lake. According to the residents’ brief, a 1976 Army Corps of Engineers report found that the Cutoff “carried considerable commercial traffic during the steamboat era between 1840 and 1880.”

For decades, residents reached the water from a boat launch in the right of way of Farm-to-Market Road 1667. The residents’ brief says the landowner placed fill and a fence there in early 2022. Residents organized as Save the Cutoff and sued the landowner’s company, Iron River Ranch II LLC.

The ruling on appeal

In September 2025, Judge Dan Moore of the 173rd District Court in Henderson County ruled for the landowner. He concluded that the old Trinity River portion of the Cutoff “is not a stream nor is it in any meaningful sense still navigable,” reached “the same conclusions” about the old Cedar Creek channel, and found “no right of use and enjoyment in the public to the waters of Creslenn Lake.” He wrote that he saw “no substantial distinction between a government-made oxbow lake and a naturally occurring one.”

The two sides

Save the Cutoff argues that the old river channel was more than 30 feet wide in its natural state, which makes it “navigable by statute” under Section 21.001 of the Texas Natural Resources Code, and that the public therefore has a right to use it.

The landowner’s company says the case is about a lake, not a river. “This is a case about water,” its brief says, “but not the kind governed by Section 21.001(3).” It adds that Creslenn Ranch Lake is “completely isolated” from the Trinity and Cedar Creek. “No person can travel by boat from the Trinity River to Creslenn Ranch Lake.”

Blake Beckham, a lawyer for the landowner, told the Tribune there is “no evidence in the record at all” of a navigable stream being impounded. Eric Allmon, who represents Save the Cutoff, said the state’s brief would “only strengthen what we feel like was already a compelling case.”

Why it matters

The appeals court’s ruling will decide whether a waterway that carried steamboats in the 1800s is still the public’s to fish, or a private lake behind a fence.