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.
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“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.