Take or pay

NTWMD sells to its members under the take-or-pay system: a city has to buy a minimum amount of water, set at its historical high, a year to ensure adequate funding for infrastructure. How does that encourage conservation?

Mr. Massey and Hal Cranor, McKinney’s public works director, said that through conservation, demand for water increases slowly. If people use less water, they said, that creates capacity within their current take-or-pay amounts to accommodate more people.
...

“We know we’ll go above our take-or-pay [minimum] as we keep growing,” Mr. Cranor said.

In largely built-out cities such as Garland, Plano and Richardson, current water use is still far below the peaks they hit years ago.

Garland, for instance, consumed about a billion gallons more this year than last, but it’s still about a billion gallons short of its contract amount. Plano is 4.5 billion gallons short but 3.2 billion gallons ahead of last year. Finance officials said the cost of the unused water is built into water rates.

Oklahoma Water Still Cheap, Illegal

Irving has reached an agreement to import 25,000 acre feet of Oklahoma's wettest water from the city of Hugo via a proposed pipeline to Cooper Lake and on to Lake Lewisville. Hugo uses only about five percent of the 30,000 acre feet annual yield of its Lake Hugo, so it still has room to grow or sell a little more. Hugo will receive about $68 per acre foot, about $1.8 million a year. The city's budget comes to about $8 million a year and is in one of the poorest counties in the state.

Hugo is also applying with the Ok Water Resources Board to increase the permitted yield of the lake by 200,000 acre feet.

Stan Stamper, publisher of the Hugo Daily News, said the local business community supports the sale. He said the nearby rivers and their watersheds produce enough water to support 30 million to 40 million people. By comparison, the population of Oklahoma is about 4 million, he said.

"We have an enormous surplus of water that has been underutilized for decades," said Stamper, a member of a committee that studied selling the water. "That is a lot of water and it is being underutilized and the Metroplex is looking for water . . . and the chances of this part of Oklahoma going dry are virtually nil."

The Tarrant Regional Water Disctrict, gaining a competitor in the import push, says Irving is being 'reckless' and 'regionally nonsupportive'. TRWD, along with the other members of the North Texas Water agency, has unsuccessfully tried to negotiate a similar deal for the past few years

Why did that deal not go through? The same big impediment to this deal: Oklahoma requires legislative approval for any out-of-state water sales. Irving has agreed to fund a court challenge to the moratorium this time around, and the TRWD has a similar lawsuit pending in at the 10th Circuit in Denver.

Reading

Proceedings of the Far West Texas Climate Change Conference, hosted by the TWDB

One Meeting Isn't Enough

The Amarillo Globe-News editorializes that officials need many more discussions on water planning like the Senate Natural Resources Committee hearing that occurred this week because water planning is complicated and the Lege will be handling lots of important water rules this session, especially in the area of property rights.

Panhandle water policy officials and state legislators need to have many more discussions such as the one that occurred this week in Amarillo.

Why? Because the next Legislature well might have to hammer out a bucketload of new rules governing the use of water.

As the Texas Senate Natural Resources Committee heard for the umpteenth time this week, water planning is a complicated endeavor.

...

Austin lawyer Brian Sledge, who made the trek to Amarillo to listen to the discussion, said the issue of property rights "is coming to a head."

Sen. Bob Duncan, R-Lubbock, whose district includes the eastern Panhandle, said he believes "nobody owns the water under their property, but they have the right to drill and capture it." Then he opened the door, if only a little, to the possibility of "central control" of water.

...

Now that our water supplies are dwindling under our feet here in the Panhandle, we need to keep that discussion alive as well - and keep legislators alert to the catastrophe that awaits us if we fail to stay vigilant about water use.

Conserve, conserve, you've got the nerve

That's the new water conservation jingle that Ray Benson is singing for the Austin Water Utility.

For Want of Water

That's the title of a series the Las Vegas Sun published in June, along with a trove of stories and opinions about the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Boone Can Take Your Land

Boone Pickens's Roberts County Freshwater Supply District has the power to take land by eminent domain for its planned water lines, and use the same land to run electric lines, thanks to a Lege action last session. That public power exercised by Mr. Pickens and his employees doesn't sit well with our dry friends to the west.

But state legislators and rural landowners like Horton are balking at a project that exports water from a waning aquifer and an arrangement that seems to give a private project the public's power to take land.

"It just offends me that a farce would allow eminent domain to apply," [rancher Kenneth] Horton said.

Property owners along a 250-mile stretch between Roberts and Jack counties received letters in April alerting them of the proposed pipeline route. The letters, from the Roberts County Freshwater Supply District and Mesa Power, took the latest step in what even its detractors call an ingenious business plan.
...
An amendment that seemed to attract little notice in the last legislative session allows wind energy projects to use right of way held by a freshwater district to host transmission lines from wind energy projects. That works nicely for an enormous Pickens wind farm planned to supply up to 4,000 megawatts of power.

The Water Energy Nexus

Ever heard of it?

"It takes energy to move water, and it takes a lot of water to make energy," said Michael Webber, the associate director at the University of Texas' Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy.
..

"Conserving water and conserving energy are synonymous," Webber, one of the report's authors, told a Senate panel in April.

He said renewable energies from wind turbines and solar panels require almost no water to operate. But he warned that some unconventional alternatives can make matters worse: Desalination plants produce potable water, but they require a lot of energy. Biofuels can substitute for foreign oil, but they require lots of water.

...

About a fifth of water drawn from the Colorado River is used by power plants from Austin down to Matagorda, said Suzanne Zarling, executive manager of water services at the Lower Colorado River Authority.

And power plants hoping to locate along the Colorado River's banks have put out feelers for possible water use that, taken together, would roughly equal all the water available during drought in the Highland Lakes, or about 445,000 acre-feet a year.

Of course, in-stream uses of water for power plant cooling aren't the same as shipping virtual water in the form of biofuels.

Insufficiently fundilated links

Boone Pickens is about to invest $1.5 billion in Panhandle wind turbines that will produce electricity for North Texas. His Mesa Water and Power companies plan on starting right-of-way acquisition this summer to place a water pipeline and electric lines.

Save Our Springs, which has battled developers over the Edwards Aquifer and our Barton Springs is bankrupt and having trouble getting a judge to accept their replayment plan. The group has lost some sway in Austin recently and could end up like their beat up old nemesis Gary Bradley. I linked to a new documentary on the SOS-Bradley duel here.

The Seminole water utility is piloting a wind-powered desalination plant to treat water from the Santa Rosa aquifer. It will produce 30,000 gallons a day from a 50 kilowatt turbine.

Lake Columbia

Is set for construction in 2011 or 2012

LUFKIN - Officials with the Angelina and Neches River Authority are sticking to their plan, 30 years in the making, to provide a rural water supply in Cherokee and Smith counties.

Kenneth Reneau, ANRA general manager, confirmed Wednesday that Lake Columbia is nearing construction, despite several necessary hurdles.

"We're looking somewhere in the 2011, 2012 time frame," he said. "We will be in the construction phase once we get (necessary documentation)."
...

"Lake Columbia is a necessary project for this five-county planning area," Reneau said. "The long-term future for water supply in this area is a question, and a number of participants are currently depending on wells for their water.

"As that area grows, demand for water will continue to grow also. We believe this project will take care of needs in quantity as well as quality."

...

"Conservation is certainly an element in solving the problem, but additional water sources will have to be generated."

More smart Mekong sentences

Cooperation in and of itself is not the desired end for third-world riparian governments who create transboundary governance institutions; rather cooperation is perceived as the basis for proceeding with the development of water resources encompassed by basins.

from Rethinking transboundary waters: A critical hydropolitics of the Mekong basin, by Sneddon and Fox, Political Geography 25(2006) pp 181-202

Smart Sentences

The international financial institution claim that "large revenues are essential for development risks conflating "economic growth" with "development" Philip Hirsch observes that the impacts of dam development have to be seen in terms of unequal distribution of costs and benefits.
...
Some opponents of big dams argue that international financial institution involvement in large hydropower projects is explained best not by alruism, but rather by the interst of the Banks in preserving their raison d'etre.

from Greacen and Palettu, Electricity Sector Planning and Hydropower, in Democratizing Water Governance in the Mekong Region, Lebel et al ed. at Amazon

Lake Meredith

Is going dry: it has received almost no inflows because of a drought over the past seven years, and is about to fall below the level of the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority's intake points. CRMWA has decided not to ration the water taken out of the lake, and not it faces decisions on how much to pay for mobile pumps to extend its reach as the lake level flows. The Authority has invested heavily in rights to aquifer water to supplement, and eventually replace the lake, but the well fields there aren't yet at full production.

Cities will continue draining the Panhandle's drought-wracked reservoir rather than cut drinking supplies for Lubbock and other customers, regional water directors voted Wednesday.

Directors of the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority voted to draw down the dwindling Lake Meredith using trailer-mounted pumps that could fetch water long after the shoreline falls out of the reach of the authority's water system.

...

The pumps are the latest investment in a costly fight against drought conditions. Directors in 2002 began tapping groundwater fields originally drilled to improve the taste of the briny lake water. They dramatically expanded the authority's rights to the aquifer under Roberts County as water levels fell, spending a projected $76 million to secure access. Lubbock has drawn two-thirds of the water spilled from customer taps so far this year from under that Panhandle ranchland.

...

Levelland director Carl Shamburger asked whether cities should simply limit the pumping from Meredith rather than spending money on new equipment.

Amarillo and Lubbock representatives said to stop pumping would simply cede the water to evaporation.

"If we could stop the evaporation and then conserve it out, that would be ideal, but we all know, as staff has reported, we cannot stop the evaporation," Lubbock Deputy City Manager Tom Adams said. "Politically, I don't think it would be acceptable to be cutting off our citizens from water knowing it's just up here evaporating."

Rio Grande: border, bridge, blight

On our attempts to concretize, that is.

The Dept of Homeland Security has approved an override of, among other
things, the applicable federal environmental laws to allow quicker
construction of a border fence through El Paso. El Paso and UT-El
Paso are concerned because the fence is planned to go right through a
city park containing wetlands that are just being restored.

Since cross-border migration has been happening for more than a few
years longer than the current Brown Menace scare, I don't really see
how building a fence more quickly solves the problem of people on both
sides of the river being culturally connected.

It's hard for me to get past my malice toward the Bush administration,
but when I do I still see a government response, of obstacles to
humans and disregard for nature, that will be overcome in ways we
can't foresee.

http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_8906405

"
AUSTIN -- The manager of El Paso's largest city park is concerned that
federal plans for a border fence will undo years of work to restore
natural wetlands on the Rio Grande.

And U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's decision last
week to circumvent environmental protection laws that could hold up
progress on the barrier have John Sproul, manager of Rio Bosque
Wetlands Park, wondering whether sensitive wildlife and habitat will
even be considered before construction begins.

"It's a landscape you just don't see in our river valley today,"
Sproul said.

The Department of Homeland Security plans to build about 57 miles of
fence on the border starting at Socorro and continuing east of the
Fabens port of entry.

The fence will be 15 to 18 feet high, though its final positioning and
design have not been decided.

About a mile of that fencing would abut the 372-acre city park, which
is managed by the University of Texas at El Paso Center for
Environmental Resource Management.

Sproul said staff and volunteers at the park have been working for 10
years to restore the wetlands, the only one of its kind in the El Paso region,
to its original condition.

Recently, he said, coyotes and beavers have returned to the area. And
UTEP is planning an exhibit to celebrate progress to restore native
plants and animals in the park.

"The opportunity for the full range of plants and animals found
historically in the river valley to eventually get established at the
park would be compromised" by the fence, Sproul said.

...

The Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club echoed those concerns in
comments it sent last month to the Department of Homeland Security.
The department relied on brief visits to the area to conduct its
environmental analysis, wrote Cyrus Reed, the chapter's conservation
director.

"A much more robust survey should be taken to assess the types of
species present in the construction area," Reed wrote.

...

The group, which includes U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, argues
that the waivers violate the constitutional separation of powers
between Congress and the executive branch.

...

Brandi Grissom may be reached at bgrissom@...; 512-479-6606.
"

The Trinity River Gets Makeup Love

My classmate Chuck found this

Nature center, other projects blooming in Great Trinity Forest

Trails, nature center planned for sprawling forest

11:04 PM CDT on Sunday, April 6, 2008

By ROY APPLETON / The Dallas Morning News
rappleton@dallasnews.com

Note to hikers and bikers, birders and boaters: The pace is picking up in the Great Trinity Forest.

Ten years after Dallas voters approved a far-reaching redo of the Trinity River Corridor, the waterway's woodlands are ripe with projects designed to tap and protect the sprawling resource at the city's southern door. For example:

•A nature center, to be operated by the National Audubon Society, will officially open in October.

•Construction of the first segment of a proposed 24-mile system of concrete trails is expected to begin in June, with completion by year's end.

•The concrete paving of a portion of the Buckeye Trail in Rochester Park is scheduled to begin next month, as is construction of the Moore Park Gateway in Oak Cliff, the first of at least four new trailheads into the forest.

•The first draft of a 100-year forest management plan will be released this summer.

•Design of a city-owned equestrian center will resume this summer if a nonprofit group raises enough money toward its share of the cost.

The forest projects are among the first to break ground in a $1.7 billion program for a riverfront toll road, parks, recreation, flood control and bridges.

Also Online

Map: Opening up the Great Trinity Forest

As designated by planners, the forest stretches along the Trinity from the former Santa Fe railroad near Corinth Street southeast to Interstate 20.

It covers about 6,000 acres of land lying mostly in the river's 100-year floodplain, making it among the largest urban hardwood forests in North America, said Bryan Kilburn, the city's Trinity forestry manager.

"There's so much more than just the toll road and the levees," he said of the future highway, which survived an election last year to kill it.

Hardwoods – including black willow, American and cedar elm, red oak, burr oak, green ash and pecan – cover about 87 percent of the forest, much of which is less than 50 years old, having emerged from land long cultivated for farming. The city owns about two-thirds of the forest property and plans to acquire the rest.

"We don't want you cutting on big branches overhead," trail planner Wade Peterson told a group of contractors as they walked the future route of one path.

When built this year, the 12-foot-wide concrete hike-and-bike way will extend from a trailhead near the river and Loop 12 through the Joppa Preserve park to Simpson Stuart Road. Passing small lakes, running atop levees and crossing creeks, the trail will cut through an area now scarred in stretches by litter and junk.

"There are wild hogs down in here," said Mr. Peterson, walking along. "They usually just go away."

That two-mile trail will be the first piece of a system designed to connect with others in the city and forest itself.

One of those is the Buckeye Trail, which winds through the woods of Rochester Park about four miles south of downtown.

One segment leads to a grove of Texas buckeye trees (this year's white flowery bloom is over), while another ends at a river overlook.

That latter, half-mile stretch will be paved with concrete in the months ahead, to the objection of at least one local naturalist.

"It will destroy any sense of being in a wild area," said Jim Flood, who routed the dirt path six years ago and leads public hikes there.

"Once it gets opened up like that, it's going to be a less-safe trail. You put concrete in and the next thing you know, people are going to want streetlights."

Mary Ayala, the city's Trinity recreation manager, said the goal is to provide a trail that is wheelchair accessible and durable. Crushed stone would make the trail accessible, but floods might wash it out, and replacements cost more over time than concrete, she said.

"It is a sensitive area, but you want to have opportunities for everyone," she said.

The Buckeye Trail construction and other trails planned for the Rochester Park area will increase recreation opportunities for neighboring residents.

"It's wonderful, man. It's going to be an adventure," said Marvin Richardson, who lives near the trailhead at the end of Bexar Street.

He said he lived for 27 years in the Turner Courts public housing up the street and has never walked the Buckeye Trail. He might check it and the other forest projects out because "curious minds want to know."

Local youngsters stand to benefit most of all, Mr. Richardson said. "I couldn't even start to tell you what it's going to mean to those kids," he said. "They've never had anything like this."

Dallas has never had anything like the Trinity River Audubon Center, either. Built on the site of a former landfill near the river, the almost $14 million city-owned center and grounds will offer nature education, exhibits and hiking.

"That pool was 11 feet high in debris. Now it's 8 feet deep in water," said Don Burns, the city's project manager, looking at one of 10 ponds on the property.

About two miles northwest of the nature center, the city and a nonprofit have agreed to share in building the Texas Horse Park. The 225-acre center and grounds, near Loop 12 and Pemberton Hill Road, would host equestrian competitions and provide trails for horseback riding.

The group – Texas Horse Park Inc. – would operate the center and is trying to raise its estimated $15 million share of the project. If it shows enough success and design resumes this summer, construction could begin in September 2009 with possible completion by late 2010, said Mr. Burns, manager of that project as well.

The Moore Park Gateway, near the Dallas Area Rapid Transit rail station at Eighth and Corinth streets in Oak Cliff, will be the entry point for a new trail across the river bottom.

Other trailheads are planned for Rochester Park, the Joppa community and near Interstate 20. Canoe access points will be added near I-20 and Moore Park. Planners would like to see a campsite near White Rock Creek.

The forest is no Central Park. But at roughly seven times the size of New York City's jewel, it stands to be a regional draw. Not only will it expand recreational options, but someday, Mr. Kilburn said, it could fuel economic growth and change perceptions of an area of the city that has lacked opportunities.

How and how much the public takes to the forest will be answered in time. Responsibilities and funding for its upkeep haven't been resolved.

"It's going to take a long-term commitment by the city of Dallas," Mr. Kilburn said. "Hopefully, there will be some ownership by the neighborhoods."

And volunteers will continue to play an important role.

"It's my hope people will want to be involved in this, put their money where their mouth is," Mr. Kilburn said.

"People talk about a green Dallas. Well, here's an opportunity."