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.

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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.