Where would new water supplies come from?
Texas is looking to desalination to remove salt from seawater or brackish groundwater to create more water for drinking, irrigation and industrial uses.
Another strategy would be treating produced water, which is wastewater that comes out of the ground during oil and gas production. According to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, every barrel of oil produced also generates five barrels of wastewater.
Perry lists both options as eligible for state money in Senate Bill 7. He also acknowledged that old pipes are leaking massive amounts of water every year, calling that primarily a local issue.
Why would the state need to pay for local infrastructure repairs?
A 2022 report by Texas Living Waters Project, a coalition of environmental groups, estimated that Texas water systems lose at least 572,000 acre-feet per year, or about 51 gallons of water per home or business connection every day — enough water to meet the total annual municipal needs of Austin, El Paso, Fort Worth, Laredo and Lubbock combined.
Some of Texas’ water infrastructure is nearly as old as the state itself — the oldest pipes date back to as early as the 1890s. In 2019, Little Bill’s Plumbing in Pampa unearthed a wooden water pipe that experts believed could have been used before the city was incorporated.
Tom Gooch, vice president and a water resource planner with Freese and Nichols, said much of Texas’ water infrastructure is nearing the end of its useful life, but repairs remain largely a local responsibility — and funding is limited.
“The tradition in Texas has been that this kind of maintenance and repair tends to be a local responsibility.”
Many pipes across the state are over 100 years old, and underground pipes can be damaged when the ground around them expands and contracts during droughts and wetter weather cycles. Corrosion and leaks are hard to detect, and with thousands of miles of underground pipes, repairs are expensive and time-consuming.
Sources like the State Water Implementation Fund for Texas give local governments money to help, but there are more funding requests than the Water Development Board can fund.
