Passport to Texas

Lake Wichita

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When Tom Lang, the Texas Parks and Wildlife District Fisheries Supervisor in Wichita Falls, took over his position eight years ago…

Eight of the lakes in this district had completely died up. And one of those was here at lake Wichita. This is the third oldest lake in the state of Texas.

Lang manages fisheries resources for eight counties in North Texas. Lake Wichita offered a challenge.

We’re starting a lake over. So we�re going to drain the water, the little bit of water that’s in it, and we’re going to dig it out and double the storage capacity.

The plan is comprehensive, and includes amenities like bike paths. A project of this scale requires community support. Lang developed relationships that helped to raise more than 4-million dollars for the project.

A project of this magnitude is expensive. And to have the community that we have here and the resources that we�ve been able to have, to be able to get the ball rolling on those, has really been important and very special.

Local business man Steven “Reno” Gustafason is optimistic about the future of Lake Wichita. He says the plan means decades of benefit to the community.

Tom’s plan is to bring back the fish, to bring back people coming to the lakes to go boating, people that will come and ride
their bikes on the bike trail. Just enjoy the lake like we did.

See this work in progress this week on the Texas Parks and Wildlife TV series on PBS.

We receive support from RAM Trucks: built to serve.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2018 at 12:00 am and is filed under TPWD TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.