Lawmakers back campaign donor in fight over East Texas waterway

The fight over a beloved East Texas fishing hole has dragged on for more than three years now.

The Cutoff is a narrow body of water on the border of Henderson and Navarro Counties. The long lake used to be part of the Trinity River before it was severed by a levee project in the 1920s.

Generations of people have come to the Cutoff to enjoy the outdoors. The water is generally calm, with lots of room to catch crappie or duck hunt. It was an outdoor oasis for families during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But in 2022, the owner of the land around the Cutoff, Phillip Surls, put up a fence near the entry to the water. Surls did not respond to interview requests for this story.

A group of locals formed a nonprofit called Save the Cutoff to push for unobstructed access to the water, arguing that it is still a public resource even if the land around it is privately owned. But lawsuits they’ve filed have been unsuccessful so far, and powerful people have aligned behind the interests of the landowner.

“This whole ordeal, I’ve tried to stay optimistic,” said Bud Morton, one of Save the Cutoff’s leaders. “But we’ve run into a lot of hurdles, so it’s real easy to get discouraged.”

‘I was blown away’

In addition to filing lawsuits, Save the Cutoff has also lobbied lawmakers. Morton said that the staffers and elected officials he’s talked to have been cordial and quick to respond, but seemed reluctant to get too involved.

“They all assured me that their office had zero involvement. That this was, you know, pending legal matters. And ethically, there was nothing they could even try to do,” he said.

But Morton recently obtained a letter lawmakers sent to the Texas Department of Transportation in February that was not previously made public.

State Sen. Robert Nichols, Rep. Keith Bell, and Rep. Cody Harris – who all represent parts of East Texas –  asked the agency to give Surls control of the only road to the Cutoff, a stretch of FM 1667 that’s just over a mile long. Surls’ property, Iron River Ranch, surrounds the road, which is currently owned by the state.

If Iron River Ranch controls the road, the public may not be able to get to the Cutoff anymore. 

“The only place it goes is inside [Surls’] ranch,” said Nichols, who chairs the state Senate Transportation Committee and used to be a TxDOT commissioner. “And it makes no sense for the state to maintain and spend state tax dollars to maintain a guy’s driveway.”

When Nichols first learned about the situation in 2022, he thought that Save the Cutoff had reasonable arguments. That year he met with both Surls and the nonprofit to hear them out, and then told the Texas Standard he didn’t think he had a role to play in the dispute.

But as he’s learned more about the case, he said, Nichols has concluded that there’s no public benefit for the state to maintain the road to the Cutoff.

“[People] cross over his fence, get on his private property,” Nichols said. “Is that really the beneficial use for the public, to use a road to access a creek across a guy’s fence? I don’t think so.”

The letter also included messages from neighboring landowners addressed to Gov. Greg Abbott showing their support for Iron River Ranch taking over FM 1667. The messages were dated November 2023.

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Morton and other members of Save the Cutoff are upset that Nichols, Bell, and Harris sent the letter encouraging TxDOT to give the road to Surls without informing the public.

“I was blown away,” said Dustin Baker, another of the group’s leaders. “If you’re going to tell me something that I don’t like, no big deal. Just tell me right to my face and I’ll respect you for it.”

Save the Cutoff was formed in 2022 to fight for access to the beloved waterway. Michael Minasi / Texas Standard

Both Harris and Bell have received financial support from Surls since this ordeal started. Nichols has not.

Records from the Texas Ethics Commission show that Surls donated $3,500 to Harris since 2022. He also gave Bell $2,000 in 2024.

Harris could not respond to an interview request by this story’s deadline. Bell did not respond to a request.

Surls has also given money to officials who are elected statewide, including $10,000 to Attorney General Ken Paxton, $2,500 to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s political action committee, and $7,500 to Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham. 

TxDOT and the Cutoff

Marc Williams, TxDOT’s executive director, responded to Nichols, Bell, and Harris on March 24, 2025, thanking them for their attention to the matter.

“TxDOT is working diligently with all interested parties involved in resolving this important matter. TxDOT hopes to come to a satisfactory and legal resolution as soon as possible,” Williams wrote.

This was not the agency’s first involvement with the Cutoff. In September 2022, a few months after Surls put up the fence, TxDOT told him to remove it because it was in the agency’s right of way. He had 30 days to take it down, according to the letter.

“If these improvements have not been removed by the deadline, we will have no choice but to seek further action,” wrote Vernon Webb, the agency’s Tyler District Engineer.

More than three years later however, the fence is still there, and TxDOT has taken no further action. Instead of defending its right of way in court, the agency plans to abandon FM 1667, according to a statement from Tyler District Public Information Officer Jeff Williford.

“After careful evaluation, TxDOT has determined that continued maintenance of this one-mile segment of FM 1667 is not a sustainable or responsible use of public resources,” the statement said. “This portion of FM 1667 was originally constructed in 1959 to provide access to Creslenn Park, which is no longer in existence. Today, the segment serves only one property owner. Based on the costs of continued maintenance, and potential costs associated with litigation and appeals, the agency has decided to explore other options.”

One option is to give control of the road to Surls and Iron River Ranch. Another is to give it to Henderson County.

The Henderson County Commissioner’s Court voted 3-2 on Sept. 30 to tell TxDOT they are interested in potentially taking control of the road. If they do so, the road to access the Cutoff would remain open to the public.

Conversations between the county and TxDOT are ongoing. Some of the commissioners were concerned about taking on any new maintenance costs – a point that one of Surls’ lawyers, Blake Beckham, emphasized while speaking in front of the court on Sept. 30.

“The state has now decided that they’re spending a lot of money maintaining a road that goes to nowhere,” Beckham said. “So I would encourage the commissioners to make decisions with the fiscal stability of the county in mind. Do they want to take on all of that?”

‘Hey did you do this?’

Beckham has defended Surls in court against legal action from Save the Cutoff.

Save the Cutoff unsuccessfully sued Surls over violations of the Clean Water Act, relating to dredging the landowner had done near the Cutoff when he put up the fence. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued Surls a violation for the dredging.

Earlier this month, the Texas Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in another case brought by Save the Cutoff against Henderson County and Commissioner Wendy Spivey. The group claimed that the county commissioners had failed to maintain another road to access the Cutoff.

And, a district judge recently ruled against the group in another lawsuit, this one to declare the Cutoff as a navigable waterway. As a result of the district judge’s decision however, the Cutoff cannot currently be accessed by boat.

Save the Cutoff appealed the decision. The first hearing for the appeal has yet to be scheduled.

But if TxDOT decides to give FM 1667 to Surls, a ruling in favor of Save the Cutoff in the navigability case could be irrelevant, since the public may not be able to legally get to the water anyway.

Meanwhile, the Cutoff itself isn’t nearly as busy as it used to be. But people are still going down there.

A few weeks ago, Dustin Baker took his 13-year-old son and a friend down to the Cutoff to fish on a Sunday morning. They were met by Surls and members of the Henderson County Sheriff’s department.

Someone had cut the fence.

“We exchanged pleasantries with the landowner, the sheriff’s department, and of course they weren’t real talkative you know,” Baker said. “They asked me, ‘Hey did you do this?’ ‘No Ma’am, I didn’t do it.’ And we carried our stuff through the hole in the fence and we put our boat in the water and we went fishing again.”

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