The severe drought across Texas apparently hasn’t made it dry enough for lawmakers to pour billions of dollars into a plan to increase the state’s water supply over the next 50 years.

The Texas House balked at two bills intended to create the first permanent funding source for the 4-year-old plan, which calls for the state to invest in a new round of reservoirs, pipelines and other infrastructure to avoid water shortages in 2060.

The legislation died in a House committee last week because of concerns over new fees and dipping into a fund that helps to balance state’s budget, said Rep. Allan Ritter, a Nederland Republican who authored the bills.

“The problem is, this is a vote on fees and taxes, and I can’t get the votes,” Ritter said. “But we’re going to need to make it a higher priority because it’s a serious, serious problem.”

In contrast, the record dry years of the 1950s led Texas — with federal assistance — to construct dozens of major reservoirs during the 1960s and ’70s.

State and regional officials are proposing construction of as many as 26 new reservoirs, as well as more pipelines and greater conservation, to provide water for a projected 46 million Texans in 2060 — nearly double the current population. The estimated price tag: $53 billion.

To aid the projects, Ritter proposed a twofold approach. First, lawmakers would make a one-time transfer of $500 million from a fund created to help low-income people pay their utility bills but that now is used to help reduce the state’s deficit. Second, they would create a tap fee that residential, commercial and industrial users would pay each month for the next 15 years.

The bills, if passed, would have produced $27 billion for projects in the state water plan, by official estimates.

Both proposals fell victim to the state’s fiscal crisis, said Heather Harward, executive director of the H2O4Texas Coalition, which includes oil companies, manufacturers, municipalities and the Nature Conservancy of Texas among its members.

“It’s been a struggle on a good day” to get funding for the water plan, she said. “It’s been an even greater struggle with this budget situation.”

Still, Harward noted that the Legislature agreed to ask voters to approve a ballot measure for a revolving $6 billion bond program that would pay for major water supply projects. A $2 billion bond program that was approved in 2001 is about to end.

The state’s bond program allows cities, counties and water providers to fund such projects at a lower cost than they would on their own, Harward said, adding that the program was the coalition’s top legislative priority.

“We would have a huge crisis without bonding,” she said. “Projects would stop in their tracks.”

But the bond program, administered by the Texas Water Development Board, is not limited to projects in the state’s water plan. The money also can be used for wastewater treatment plants, for example.

“That doesn’t get us too far” toward implementation of the state plan, said Ken Kramer, director of the Sierra Club’s Lone Star chapter and a water expert.

Kramer said he supported Ritter’s bills because they set aside at least 20 percent of the funds for conservation or reuse projects, not just more dams and reservoirs. Many environmentalists, farmers, ranchers and others who rely on land for their livelihood oppose lake-building because the projects drown native habitats.

“The reality is, not all of these projects are needed,” Kramer said. “We’ve always talked about the state funding some of the plan, but not all. We need to look at how to do more through conservation.”

State officials estimate that demand for water will exceed supply in Texas by 8.3 million acre-feet by 2060. An acre-foot is roughly enough to keep two homes supplied with water for a year.

The estimates on future water availability are based on the 1950s drought, the worst on record in Texas. About half of the state is now in the worst category of drought — “exceptional” — which denotes a 50- to 100-year event, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor’s latest report.

“We’ve operated on the premise that the drought of the ’50s is the worst we would see,” said Andrew Sansom, executive director of the River Systems Institute at Texas State University and author of the book “Water in Texas.” “Unfortunately, that may not be true.”

The current dry spell is reason enough to rethink the water plan, which reflects “an era when we looked at how much water it will take to meet the demand,” Sansom said.

The funding proposals failed in part because they didn’t take a holistic approach to the problem, he said. The state’s water plan should promote even more conservation, including the purchase of development rights to protect aquifers.

“We can build all the dams we want,” he said, “but if we don’t protect our watersheds, it won’t matter.”