[This transcript was generated automatically from audio using AI and hasn't been reviewed by a person -- it can contain mistakes, including plausible-sounding sentences that were never actually said. Treat it as a starting point, not a verbatim record.]

[0:04] Council member trees. Council member Moore. Council member Wilson. Mayor scurrup. Mayor pro
[0:11] Tim Green. Council member Sutton. Mayor council member author has indicated that he's unable
[0:17] to attend tonight's meeting. There is a quorum to conduct. Thank you very much.
[0:27] So we'll move
[0:27] on to item number three, Portland Water Needs. So city council will discuss future water needs after
[0:32] your presentations from staff and other subject matter experts on water.
[0:37] The current water sources shorted short and long-term water needs and the need for alternative
[0:42] water sources for Portland.
[0:45] Excuse me, before we get started, I want to read kind of opening statement.
[0:53] So good evening, everyone.
[0:55] Tonight's workshop is one of the most important discussions we have as a city.
[1:00] water is just is not just a utility. It's the foundation of our homes, our
[1:05] businesses, and our community's future. Across the Corpus Christi region we
[1:11] are facing a water crisis that demands attention and action. Here in Portland we
[1:17] currently rely on the City of Corpus Christi and the San Patricia Municipal Water
[1:21] District for our water supply. We do not have our own water and that
[1:26] That dependence puts our community at risk if supplies tighten or new projects are delayed.
[1:32] For the past several years, we have made water a priority topic in our strategic planning
[1:39] sessions.
[1:40] We've always known that this day could come.
[1:43] The day when discussion alone would no longer be enough.
[1:48] I speak for the entire City Council when I say that we value our regional partnerships
[1:53] and appreciate the work being done to secure new water sources for the entire
[1:58] coastal bend. But time is no longer on our side. It is now necessary for Portland
[2:05] to begin the process toward water independence to ensure that our
[2:09] residents and businesses have a reliable sustainable water supply for the future.
[2:15] Our city manager will lead us in tonight's discussion and I know the
[2:19] Council will have many questions and difficult decisions as we move forward.
[2:24] This workshop marks the beginning of a critical process for our city's long-term future.
[2:29] Time is of the essence.
[2:31] Every day we delay making securing water for Portland more difficult and more expensive.
[2:39] Our responsibility as your elected officials is to act now to protect the future of Portland
[2:45] and the people who call it home. Mr. Wright.
[2:49] Mayor, thank you.
[2:54] Tonight's meeting is really a high level discussion,
[2:57] an overview of our water situation here in Portland.
[3:00] We'll go over a kind of a presentation agenda in a minute.
[3:03] But what we want to do tonight is give the council a snapshot
[3:07] of our current conditions, our future needs,
[3:12] and also the various alternatives that are available to us as a community.
[3:17] We've got a long history of purchasing water from the San Francisco Municipal Water
[3:22] District.
[3:23] I think 1951, 1952 Brian, long time.
[3:27] But since that time, we've grown considerably.
[3:30] This chart shows how Portland's population has really taken off over the last 60 years
[3:39] or so.
[3:39] So we've grown, outgrown a lot of the cities here in the community, we've grown where
[3:44] other cities have not grown.
[3:48] This has been somewhat organic just because, you know, I think we've got a great city,
[3:53] we attract citizens, but the industry, industrial development around us also contributes to our
[4:00] growth.
[4:01] All in all though, it means that our growth requires that we secure water sources in the
[4:06] future.
[4:08] Brian's going to show you some really dramatic information about that matter here in just
[4:13] a few minutes.
[4:15] You know, this is not the first water shortage that we've faced, the water droughts are
[4:19] really cyclic, and we can expect droughts in the future, obviously.
[4:26] And what makes this cycle different, however, is that this reason, as a region, we haven't
[4:33] solve the water problem even after these many decades of risk from drought.
[4:40] So as a city we shouldn't continue to separate through these cycles when there are alternatives
[4:46] for us to look at and to study.
[4:50] As you know we've been working behind the scenes to evaluate a number of options for the city
[4:55] important. Our goal is to achieve long-term
[5:00] Resiliency with our community. Resiliency really begins with kind of understanding that we cannot depend on one single source of water. Resiliency means we need a diversified water source, and we need to find out what those sources are, and the most efficient, most effective ones, and pursue those as a community. To that end, we've recently executed an agreement with an Oasis River Authority
[5:28] to reserve 2,800 acre feet per year.
[5:33] It's about 2.5 million gallons a day of water
[5:37] from their Future Harbor Island project.
[5:39] The NRA is here tonight,
[5:40] and they've got a presentation for us as well.
[5:45] The council will ratify that agreement
[5:47] at our November 4th meeting.
[5:50] As you know, we've also engaged an law firm in Austin.
[5:58] The Vincent and Elkins firm is partnered by John Neurman.
[6:06] John was the former chairman of the TCEQ.
[6:11] We've been dealing with him directly.
[6:14] That law firm specializes in water procurement projects
[6:16] and water contracts, specifically P3 contracts.
[6:21] We're also actively seeking an engineering firm.
[6:24] We're out. We've got RFQs out. Those are due back in by the month. So I expect to have an engineering firm on on board by the first part of November at that point where you know, we're going to begin an earnest looking at the process of identifying securing additional water sources for Portland and moving forward with those.
[6:46] I don't expect any solutions tonight. What I would like to do is make sure that the council gets a full measure of information
[6:54] from these experts on what our conditions are and what the alternatives are to give you some background and framework as we move forward in this process.
[7:03] You know, we're taking positive steps towards a long-term drought-proof, resilient water supply for our citizens. That's what they demand. That's what we need to give them.
[7:13] As the mayor said, we want to make the right decisions here, but we are facing a critical shortage in time as of this.
[7:20] So we've got to get these things done sooner rather than later.
[7:25] With that, I want to move into our agenda for tonight.
[7:30] Introduction of guests, there's a couple of people I just want to introduce
[7:33] and acknowledge tonight, Ryan's course of the City of Corks Christie this year.
[7:37] Ryan, thanks for being here.
[7:40] Also, Lyle Larson just came in.
[7:43] Lyle was a former state representative, former San Antonio City Council member,
[7:48] former Bear County Commissioner and probably the water guru, the most informed person in Texas on water and we appreciate him being here working with us through these new processes.
[8:02] So with that, we're going to, here's the kind of line up we're going to talk about existing water use of conditions, projections for the City of Portland for a few minutes and I want to turn it over to John Michael.
[8:15] with Hanson Engineering and John I go back 30 years.
[8:20] John knows water better than anybody else in the county.
[8:28] And so he's going to give a presentation on all things water about San
[8:33] Churchill County. Then we'll move towards, we'll move with, to Brian Williams, the,
[8:39] with San Churchill and Mr. Water District, talk about current conditions and what the
[8:44] district's plans are going forward. We'll also have a report then from Noises of
[8:48] River Authority. John is here, John Chisholm, the new Deputy Executive
[8:55] Directors here, and we'll give that presentation for us. And then we have a
[8:59] report from Seven Seas who will be here to talk about kind of their business
[9:04] model and what they do as a company. And then we'll have an opportunity if time
[9:11] permits we have two hours for this so as I told the mayor if if this runs over you
[9:17] know we could delay the start of the council meeting if y'all are still
[9:20] engaged in conversation we can just delay that according to by law we can we need
[9:26] to start the meeting no sooner than 7 o'clock we can't start after 7 o'clock so
[9:31] with that so with that I want to turn it over John Michael let him give kind of an
[9:35] update on what's going on county John thank you for being here yeah thanks for
[9:38] I think most of you all know me.
[9:41] I'm John Michael with Hanson.
[9:42] Used to be day Smith engineering for many years.
[9:45] And we've been Hanson now for nine years.
[9:46] I was going to quit working four years ago
[9:48] and I'm still working, but I love what I'm doing.
[9:51] So there's not a lot of good things with getting old.
[9:55] You know, you can't grow hair anymore.
[9:57] You can't see, you got hearing aids.
[10:00] But you do gain institutional knowledge over time. And I've been practicing engineering here now for 44 years. I moved here in 1982, went to work for Jim Naysmith, and got immersed into the water business immediately, because Jim was very actively involved in all aspects of water, particularly here in Sampat County. He and his father for all practical purposes built the Sampat Municipal Water District. And so I got to work
[10:29] on those facilities, very early on in my career, you know, starting back in 1982.
[10:35] What I'm going to do is I'm going to take you through some history.
[10:38] Randy's heard this, Kathy's heard this, I know Brian's heard this, but I'm going to
[10:42] take you through kind of a history of progression over the last 40 years to show you how we got
[10:48] where we are, because I think it all makes sense at the end, because we have lots of options.
[10:54] You know, the good thing about being here is we do have options, it's a function of which
[10:59] trigger to you pull first. You know water supply planning is a it's a three-legged
[11:05] stool. It's pretty simple. Is it safe? Is it reliable? And is it affordable? And it's
[11:13] that affordability that is probably the hardest of the boxes to check off. Because you
[11:19] can make anything reliable and you can make anything safe. It's just a function of how
[11:24] much is it going to cost. So let's start back in 1982. This is my fourth drought, and
[11:32] they're no fun. It comes with a lot of anxiety. Mother Nature never tells you when the drought
[11:39] is going to start, and she doesn't tell you when it's going to end. And the bad thing
[11:43] about the drought that we're in right now is by far the worst I've lived through with
[11:49] no end in sight. And what compounded the problem was we added a lot of demand to our system
[11:56] without replacing supply. So we have everything working against us, you know, going into
[12:02] where we are today. And as I said, we have options. We've got to get some of them moving pretty
[12:06] quick. We have both short-term, mid-term, and long-term options that will allow this area
[12:12] to grow, but we've got to start moving on them. So as I said, this is my fourth drought.
[12:16] When I started with Jim Naysmith, one of the first things I got to do was go to Chocanian
[12:20] Reservoir for the ribbon cutting of the dam.
[12:24] They had just finished the construction, and there was no water in it, and what I didn't
[12:30] realize at the time is that we were going into a drought in 1982.
[12:36] I just didn't know it.
[12:37] Well, none of us really knew it, but they finished the dam.
[12:39] So our community, all of our region, was surviving off of one reservoir, Lake Mathis.
[12:46] Everything was Lake Mathis.
[12:50] So the city of Sinton at that time, Walter Hill was a city manager,
[12:55] hired Jim and I to help them in 1983 to rebuild their water supply system.
[13:02] They had old wells that were left over from the 40s and 50s that had just lived their life,
[13:07] if they were no good, their pump stations were bad.
[13:11] And so we put together a plan.
[13:13] And the plan was to drill three new water wells,
[13:16] two of which would be on welder property,
[13:18] which was Robin Bessie-Welder Park.
[13:20] It was donated to the city for park purposes.
[13:23] We had to get permission from the welder family
[13:25] to drill those wells for sentence use for future water supply.
[13:30] And then we drilled another well across the street.
[13:35] Our groundwater hydrologist was a guy named Steve Reed
[13:37] at El Read and Associates. You probably remember that name, right? He was really good.
[13:42] Probably knew more about groundwater hydrology than anybody in this region.
[13:46] And Steve was our hydrologist when we drilled the wells in Sydney.
[13:51] And I got to sit on the rig and do the logging of that well. And Steve showed me how to
[13:56] pick out the sands. We're the good sands. We're the bad sands where I was so impressed. I went home
[14:01] and told my wife what I got to do that day. And she's a petroleum engineer. She just laughed at me.
[14:05] that I do that every day with oil.
[14:08] So I learned a lot through that exercise in Sinton.
[14:12] What I learned the most important thing I learned
[14:15] is there was good groundwater quality
[14:18] right here in Sampat County.
[14:21] So that was in 83, we finished the first well
[14:24] and then we took five years,
[14:25] we drilled two additional wells
[14:27] and replaced the pump station.
[14:29] Then we drilled Judge Edmondson,
[14:33] some of you all might remember him,
[14:34] And he got a grant to put a water system in for the community ed Roy.
[14:40] So Steve and I went over there and drilled two wells in ed Roy and built a water system
[14:45] for them.
[14:47] Again, pretty good groundwater, not as good a groundwater as in, but it was pretty good.
[14:52] Well the drought started to deepen. In 1984 the alarm
[15:00] Bill started going off. We got to a point where we were looking down the shoot of literally running out of water. It's kind of like where we're at today. And it was so serious that we thought maybe we had six months of water supply. Luther Jones was the mayor, Ed Martin was our city manager, and they tasked Hayden Head and Judge Wood to go figure out how we were going to get through this
[15:29] this crisis.
[15:32] Jim Naysmith was in charge of the technical activities
[15:35] working with Gene Urban.
[15:37] And of course, I was working on the project with Jim,
[15:40] trying to figure out how do we re-plum this system
[15:43] to get water so the Corpus Christi in its region
[15:47] could stay alive.
[15:48] Everything was on the table.
[15:50] We looked at reactivating Kingsville wells.
[15:52] They had just built the South Texas Water Authority line,
[15:55] the 42-inch line that takes water down to Driscoll
[15:57] and Bishop and Kingsville.
[16:00] We were looking at reactivating old wells in Kingsville,
[16:03] sending them back to Corpus Christi to keep industry alive.
[16:07] We were looking at tassel wells.
[16:09] Could we reactivate them?
[16:10] Put them into the Sampat water distribution system.
[16:13] We looked at everything.
[16:15] And at the end of the day, what we decided to do,
[16:20] was just start poking holes in the ground
[16:22] along the Nueces River.
[16:24] Because we knew that there was water along the river.
[16:26] and the further you got up towards the dam,
[16:28] the better the water quality.
[16:31] And so we reactivated some of the old city wells
[16:34] that were both upstream of Lake Mathis and Downstream,
[16:37] and we drilled eight new stainless steel wells,
[16:42] 800 feet deep, each one of those wells
[16:44] produced a million gallons of day of water,
[16:46] and we just literally dumped it into the river.
[16:50] And we were gonna continue to drill wells
[16:52] until the drought ended,
[16:53] because that was really our only option.
[16:57] The city had entered into agreements with the welder family
[17:00] to negotiate acquiring water rights
[17:03] on the welder property north of Sinton,
[17:05] which is what we call the evangelist now.
[17:09] But we didn't have enough time to be able to plumb that up
[17:12] and get it into the Sampat water district system
[17:15] because it would have taken a lot of time to get that done.
[17:18] The water was there.
[17:19] You just had to get it into the system.
[17:20] So we focused on drilling wells on the Nueces River.
[17:24] Well, the drought ended, you know, I want to say 87, 88.
[17:28] We had a big flood, filled Chocan and filled the Lake Mathis.
[17:32] And we got through it.
[17:33] You know, we didn't have to drill anymore wells.
[17:35] Those wells got put into a maintenance program at the city
[17:38] that would allow us to use them at some point in the future.
[17:42] The city maintained those wells all the way up to the mid 90s
[17:45] and then they just let the leases go.
[17:47] And by the way, the alloyer we worked with
[17:49] to get the leases with Steve Ellis.
[17:51] He was his first job with a Clevver law firm
[17:55] from Portland, Texas.
[17:56] He wrote those leases with those landowners
[17:59] along the noises that allowed us to drill wells
[18:02] on their property to keep this community alive.
[18:05] So we got through the 80s and we get into the 90s.
[18:10] EPA had just unleashed the new stormwater regulations
[18:14] on all the municipalities in the country.
[18:18] and Juan Garza was our city manager,
[18:21] Hasec Garza was the assistant city manager.
[18:23] They hired a guy named James Dodson to manage
[18:27] the EPA verdict with all these new stormwater regulations.
[18:33] So James got us through that.
[18:36] Well, in the early 90s and 90s,
[18:38] we had a very strong,
[18:41] Randy, is there any water, like a bottle of water?
[18:44] Look, I'm told I'm gonna get dry here.
[18:45] So, and we had a very strong environmental community.
[18:49] The Sierra Club was very strong, Pat Souter,
[18:52] and it was very hard to disseminate the environmental community
[18:57] from the Tax Rares Association.
[18:59] It was kind of one and the same, but they were powerful.
[19:02] And if you couldn't get their blessing on something,
[19:05] it probably just wasn't going to happen, right?
[19:08] So, the agreed order, there was a lawsuit file
[19:13] because when they built Chocanian, they did not settle with the environmental community,
[19:19] the fresh water, the fresh water inflows to the base in estuaries. So, James went from stormwater
[19:28] to go negotiate a settlement, which we call now the agreed order, right, so that when we have
[19:34] times of plenty, we're releasing water out of our dams for environmental flows. And then we have
[19:41] You know, there was a prescriptive calculated way that that was that was to be done and then we also got credit for waste water flows that went back into the bay.
[19:52] And so that's enough that we need to know now.
[19:54] And by the way, don't get hung up with dates and times and I'm going to get you in the ballpark with all this stuff.
[20:00] Make sense. So, we go into another drought. Now, Choke Canyon had been full and like Mathis had been full. We added some demand to the system, not a lot, but we had added some demand to the system. But we started going into a drought. And it was a pretty, pretty tough drought. Industry could see it very early on. They knew that we were going to be in trouble.
[20:27] This state of Texas started what was called the
[20:31] I'm
[20:35] going to show until kind of guy.
[20:36] The state of Texas funded a program, which was called the Trans-Texas Program, which
[20:41] is now kind of morphed into the region end plan, but this was the first effort to get
[20:47] communities to start looking down the road at all of their alternative water supplies.
[20:52] And I can assure you, there is nothing you can dream up today that we didn't look at in
[20:59] the 90s drought because it's all in this document right here.
[21:03] And one of those was the banjo and drought water.
[21:05] We talked about diesel.
[21:07] We talked about all that stuff.
[21:09] Mary Rhodes was our mayor at the time, and the drought continued to deepen.
[21:17] Mary Rhodes was smart.
[21:18] She formed a mayor's task force for water supply, and that task force included players and
[21:25] customers from the water system from all over the region.
[21:28] Portland had a representative on there, industry had representatives, the Sierra Club had representatives.
[21:33] It was a very inclusive effort that vetted that trans-Texas water program.
[21:40] And out of that program, the number one project that the committee decided was the mayor
[21:46] Rhodes pipeline.
[21:51] I brought the diesel report, both the one done in the 80s and the one I did in 94.
[21:58] I made a presentation with City Council about desalination.
[22:02] And remember that three-legged stool?
[22:04] Well, my bottom line to the council was, yeah, it works.
[22:07] Technology's getting better.
[22:08] We can't afford it because it's not there yet.
[22:12] We've got other alternatives we can look at.
[22:13] And the one that rose to the top was, let's go get water rights from Lake Texana.
[22:21] James Dodds had led that whole effort.
[22:23] We had to, we looked at getting water supply from Garwood.
[22:26] That took an interface and transferred. That was a monumental thing to get done.
[22:30] I think it might have been the first one in the state of Texas ever to have gotten done.
[22:34] James led that whole effort.
[22:36] And some of you may remember James Dodds and he was the waters are, right?
[22:40] He was the waters are and James is still a good friend. I rely on him for
[22:44] Information all the time because he when he left the city he took everything with him kind of like Donald Trump when he left the White House
[22:51] He has everything so if I need some history on water. I just called James and he'll send it to me
[22:57] So that route got tough. We put to the vote of the people to build the Mary Road's pipeline
[23:04] And it didn't pass
[23:06] Well, that didn't solve our problem.
[23:09] And Mary Rhodes was a strong-willed woman, even though she got elected by the environmental
[23:14] community and the tax process association.
[23:16] But she knew that we needed to be proactive and we needed to get this done.
[23:22] So the city asked the port to help get the Mary Rhodes pipeline permitted, designed and built.
[23:30] Well, we felt like we had about an 18-month window
[23:33] or curtailment was going to start happening.
[23:37] Frank Brogan at the port took a year and a half off
[23:40] of his life and did nothing but manage the building
[23:44] of the Mary Road's pipeline.
[23:45] HDR was the engineer of records for the project.
[23:49] They split it up amongst three engineering firms.
[23:52] We did the section from Owen Stevens
[23:53] to Woodsboro Palm Station.
[23:55] Urban did Woodsboro to Bloomington.
[23:59] and I think Goven or Goldston did the last section
[24:02] to Mayor Rhodes pipeline and then HCR did the pump stations.
[24:06] So we had a bunch of firms that were all coming together
[24:08] because we had 18 months to literally acquire the right
[24:11] of way, get it all permitted and get it built
[24:14] and Frank got it done.
[24:16] It was, and thank God, because that's what we're surviving
[24:19] off of today.
[24:20] So that got us through the drought of the 90s.
[24:25] Well, then we went into a period, you know,
[24:26] it's easy to manage a city when you're not growing, right?
[24:28] all you got to do is maintain everything.
[24:31] But when you're growing, it gets a little tougher.
[24:34] Well, from the late night, we finished Maribrow's Pipeline
[24:38] in 1997.
[24:41] And we really didn't see growth
[24:45] until the effects of the Eagleford shale.
[24:49] So we went through about a 15-year period
[24:51] where really all we had to do was maintain things.
[24:54] And what happens when you have to just maintain things?
[24:57] you let your guard down and
[25:00] And what happened is we dropped our water wells along the river. We gave up the leases, which
[25:07] we should have always maintained. And by the way, what's up on the screen is our regional
[25:11] water supply system. We'll get to that here in a minute. So, the May Rose pipeline was
[25:17] built. We've been into a maintenance mode. The state of Texas knew that we were going
[25:24] to have water supply problems because the state was growing. Even though we weren't growing,
[25:28] The rest of the state was growing, right?
[25:31] So Governor Perry and the Water Development Board funded two studies to look at where to
[25:36] locate a desalination facility.
[25:38] Where was the best place to locate a desalination facility in the state of Texas?
[25:43] And at the end result was two locations, one in the valley and Barney Davis power plant.
[25:49] CPL owned the plant at the time, but it had all the attributes you wanted.
[25:53] it had land, it had power, it had an intake structure,
[25:57] a 500 million gallons a day, it's the closest location
[25:59] to the Gulf of Mexico, if you have to discharge it,
[26:01] had everything.
[26:04] Those studies got put on the shelf
[26:07] because we weren't growing, right?
[26:08] We didn't need to spend the kind of money
[26:10] that it would take to get that done.
[26:12] So we got through about, and there's some things
[26:17] that happened in between there, but we get to about,
[26:20] Well, let's just start with a drought of 2011, all right?
[26:25] You know, the economy went off the cliff in 2007, 2008.
[26:29] We weren't growing.
[26:30] Everybody was just kind of holding on, praying that we would get the economy turned around.
[26:35] Well, during that period of time, the Eagle for Chale was found.
[26:40] Remember that guy, Steve Ellis, I was talking about he told me about it before anybody knew about it,
[26:45] because he worked on all those leases.
[26:46] I just didn't know that what he was telling me was going to change my life.
[26:51] It's going to change all of our lives here in South Texas and it still is.
[26:55] It just morphed into the Permian and, you know, horizontal fracking and all the things that have come from that.
[27:01] So we were all of a sudden starting to see an interest in bringing large-scale industry back to corpus.
[27:10] We hadn't seen that in a long time.
[27:11] We weren't growing from a municipal standpoint.
[27:13] even Portland, that's all your graph, you really weren't growing until we hit that period of time
[27:19] when all of a sudden we're on the map and things were starting to move. So we go into this drought
[27:26] of 2011 through 13, and it was a bad one, but not only for us, that one was statewide. So we were
[27:37] challenged with, you know, we had the Mary Rhodes pipeline, but we only had phase one. We had not
[27:43] built the pipeline to Colorado River at Garwood. So the question was at that time, and it was getting
[27:50] pretty darn serious, what do we do next? Do we build the second phase of Mary Road's pipeline to the
[27:57] Colorado River? Or do we look at groundwater resources in the area? And in my mind, it was
[28:06] of Angela. What people, there's a myth out there that we finally put to rest last week
[28:11] when we met with HDR and all the water people. Brian was there. The urban myth was groundwater
[28:19] at the Evangelion location was brackish and needed to be treated with RO treatment. And
[28:26] there was no capacity in the Mary Road's pipeline. Both of them were false. I told the city
[28:35] staff this for the last 15 years that that was false.
[28:40] Sit and drink that water every day.
[28:42] It meets all primary and secondary drinking water standards.
[28:46] And when we designed the Mary Road's pipeline, it was designed to get all of Texana, all
[28:52] of the Colorado River water, and about 25 million gallons a day of Gulf Coast aquifer water.
[28:57] And that could come from either Ovanjolin or a potential well field which we call Goliad
[29:02] sand's up in B and Rapero county. The water district, when Jim was at the water
[29:09] district, commissioned a study to look at groundwater at both those two
[29:13] locations and picked to move forward with the Goliad sand's project for a
[29:18] variety of the mainly because they had their act together. The landowners had
[29:21] come together and said hey we're willing to do this. When they did test wells to
[29:26] prove the well field out, when it came time to go to the next phase of funding and
[29:30] And this was in the mid 2000s, again, we weren't growing, right?
[29:35] Jim turned it over to the city for funding for the next phase.
[29:40] Ron Massey was our public works director.
[29:42] Well, we weren't growing, and Ron just put it on the side of his desk and decided not to pursue it.
[29:49] So, we weren't trying to get out of a drought at the time, we were just managing our system.
[29:54] If you can take on customers with your existing infrastructure, it helps you pay your water
[29:59] bills.
[29:59] You don't have to raise...
[30:00] That's the rights every year, right? And when you're a city council, our council, you're elected every two years, nobody wants to raise water rights. Well, how do you build future water supplies if you're not willing to encumber addition debt to meet the demand for future water customers? So it's a difficult thing to manage your way through. Well, the decision at the time was either do we go do a vangeland or do we do? Mary Rhodes phase two.
[30:28] Lloyd Neill and I used to laugh at each other driving back and forth to college station.
[30:31] We looked at Lagrange at the Colorado River and there was no water in it.
[30:35] We were like, why would we build the pipeline to the Colorado River when Austin has senior
[30:41] rights to that water and it's run of the river water and if there's no water in the river
[30:46] you don't have anything to put in the pipeline, right?
[30:50] But the decision was to go build Mary Rose phase two because this urban myth out there that
[30:57] that water up and said was no good.
[30:59] Well, I thought that battle I lost,
[31:02] but we were gonna do that at some point anyway.
[31:05] So, it's good that it got done.
[31:08] It's what we're living off of today.
[31:09] Fortunately, the Hill Country had a horrific rain this summer
[31:13] and bought us a little bit of time there,
[31:15] but they had a Colorado River was in trouble.
[31:17] And over the last couple of years, Austin would send us
[31:20] a little love letter every once in a while
[31:21] and say, hey, just want you to know that, you know,
[31:24] in a pinch, you know, maybe our water, well that was always the risk with building that
[31:30] to the Colorado River.
[31:31] James Dotson always thought that we would never build that section, that we would trade
[31:35] it for something else that we could build in our own backyard, whether that was a decal
[31:40] facility or a brackish groundwater project or something else, but we built it.
[31:46] And that's okay.
[31:48] Well, the drought started to let up, as a matter of fact, there were big floods all over the
[31:53] state of Texas during that 2014-15 timeframe. Our reservoirs never got much above 50% reservoir
[32:03] capacity. While all the other reservoirs in the state filled up, we never got really out
[32:08] of that drought. And what was beginning to happen is steel dynamics was, you know, Tommy
[32:17] Many curts in the EDC was very active trying to market this region for industrial activity,
[32:23] creates jobs, wealth for the community, all the things that we know that it does.
[32:29] But we were managing a water system that was not adding enough supply to meet that demand.
[32:37] Most cities don't have, to deal with what we deal with, 60% of our water every day is used
[32:44] by industry.
[32:46] So when you're managing a growth, a projected growth of your city, you can see the horizon pretty far out and plan for that.
[32:54] But when an industry comes in and needs 20 million gallons a day, that jumps and that's hard to predict.
[33:02] And when the next project come in and it jumps, that's hard to predict.
[33:06] steel dynamics was kicking around. The reason I'd drove Will Holly to
[33:13] sit in in my pickup truck to show him the welder ranch is because there was two
[33:18] water supplies, the Mary Road's pipeline and the Vangeland water, dual rail,
[33:23] access the deep water port in a highway and they picked that site. Now they chose
[33:28] not to buy the Vangeland groundwater rights because the city of Corpus
[33:32] sold in water for a dollar five, the published raw water rate.
[33:36] One of the replacement costs for new water would have been much, much greater than that.
[33:43] So we have a water rate model that we're going to have to figure out, move and forward.
[33:48] Because as we get these big industries wanting to come here, are you going to pass the cost
[33:53] of that new water onto mom and dad living on Elm Street that didn't create that problem?
[34:02] Well, that's why cities have impact fees, right?
[34:05] Well, they do it for industry as well.
[34:07] And we're going to have to think about doing that.
[34:09] I'm not a rate modeler guy.
[34:10] That's a science all in its own.
[34:12] But we have to start addressing that issue.
[34:15] So steel dynamics came in.
[34:17] Gulf Coast junters was starting to kind of kick around.
[34:21] I got invited to go to Taiwan with a trade mission
[34:24] led by the Port of Corpus Christi and the CCREDC.
[34:29] And the reason they brought me is because there was a rumor out around the world that you don't want to come to Corpus Christi with your business because they don't have water.
[34:39] So they asked me to go over there and make the pitch that we had water. Well, I knew Dernwell we didn't have enough water, but we could always make water.
[34:47] We could go get groundwater, and we could always use the Gulf of Mexico for desalination. And we didn't even touch brackish groundwater, right?
[34:56] So we could go make more water so when we left on
[35:00] Local government trade mish, I had a letter from Margie Rose, our city manager that said we had in 2017, 90 million gallons a day of available water for new customers.
[35:14] When we were in Taiwan, we got a note that the LNRA pulled back 10 million gallons a day or 10,000 acre feet of water that was interruptible, it was interruptible water supply that was in our contract with the LNRA.
[35:30] that they were going to keep in Jackson County for a future industry.
[35:34] Well, for most of them wanted it, and they had the right to get it.
[35:39] So while we were in Taiwan, we went down from 90 to 80.
[35:44] HDR had just completed the drought of record impact on our firm yield of our
[35:52] lake system, and it dropped our firm yield 30 million gallons a day.
[35:58] And the thing you got to keep in mind about reservoirs
[36:00] as they lose capacity every single day,
[36:03] one either through evaporation or siltation.
[36:06] The most elever hold is the day you build the dam
[36:09] and shut the gates, and from there on,
[36:12] it slowly starts to go down.
[36:15] So now we're at 40 million gallons a day.
[36:21] Steel dynamics needed six to eight at the time.
[36:24] Gulf Coast joint ventures was asking for 25.
[36:27] Fortunately, they're not using anywhere near that.
[36:29] But their contract was gonna be for 25 million gallons a day.
[36:33] Project Falcon, some of y'all remember that.
[36:37] They wanted 40 million gallons a day, and so I write this on a napkin at lunch one
[36:42] day when we were in John LaRue and Charlie's on and everybody, and I say, hey guys, hold
[36:48] on.
[36:48] We're selling the water.
[36:49] We don't have.
[36:53] And they're like, you're right, we don't have this water.
[36:57] But we're out there telling the world to come and do business with us.
[37:01] So we weren't adding any supply.
[37:04] Well, during the drought of 2011-13, get into 14-15 and 2015, the desal guys, I met the
[37:15] Poseidon guys during the drought and went out to Carlsbad and looked at that facility
[37:20] that was just being built.
[37:23] And, you know, it's a pretty interesting facility, certainly has helped them through their drought.
[37:28] But I asked the manager of the San Diego Water Authority, I said, why did you use a P3,
[37:38] a private developer to develop that diesel facility?
[37:42] And he said, look, it's real simple.
[37:44] Any elected official or water district manager in California that tried to do a diesel project
[37:50] was either not re-elected or fired.
[37:53] And we chose to offload that responsibility to the private sector and let them get it built because that was the only way it was going to get built.
[38:01] And it's now the second largest diesel facility in the country, about 50 million gallons a day.
[38:07] Kappa was the first big one, Santa Barbara was the first one but it was so expensive to operate when their drought was over they turned it off.
[38:15] So I'm going to wrap it up here pretty quick.
[38:17] So the decals thing really started to take hold and it was kind of funny it was all that it was like shark circling
[38:26] You know the dead body in the middle of the ocean, you know
[38:29] They could they were there was there was a feast that could have Todd Hunter had a big powwow down at the Orchie Center
[38:36] Where he invited all the vendors in the decal world to come and everybody was just all excited about how this decals because decals
[38:44] It's almost like a magic potion.
[38:46] Everybody wants it because you're looking at that ocean
[38:49] and you know, Dernwell, we're not going to run out of water
[38:51] if we can figure out how to make it fresh water.
[38:53] But again, it always comes down to cost.
[38:56] And so at that time, that was about 2015-17,
[39:02] I won't go into the details, but Sean Sroberidge
[39:05] wanted to look at Harbor Island.
[39:06] He had me run the cost of a pipeline for 20 million gallons a day
[39:10] from Harbor Island to Bryan Williams facilities
[39:12] He sent out water district.
[39:14] The number was stupidly high.
[39:18] And I asked him, I said, what are you doing?
[39:19] And he said, well, that's some of your business.
[39:21] I just need you to run the cost of the pipeline
[39:23] to get this moved into the system.
[39:25] I said, well, you're not in the region now,
[39:27] and you don't qualify for Swift funding.
[39:29] He said, well, that's my problem.
[39:31] We're going to deal with that.
[39:32] So then became the diesel wars.
[39:35] Corpus Christi versus the port.
[39:36] We ended up wasting a whole bunch of time on that effort.
[39:40] We tore our community apart politically.
[39:44] It resulted in where we are today.
[39:46] That's unfortunate because we should have been better about making those decisions.
[39:52] We didn't go look at low-hanging fruit during those efforts.
[39:55] We were just solely focused on it.
[39:56] Well, people will say, oh, we looked at everything.
[39:58] Well,
[40:00] So they kind of looked at everything, but if you bump the cost of groundwater so high that it looks like it's competitive with diesel, then you go, oh, diesel is guaranteed it's drought proof. Well, okay, those urban myths got put to rest at City Hall last week. So today, the city moved forward with the purchase of the water rights from a Vangeland. Still have a lot of work to do. Pape Dawson has been hired by the city to,
[40:28] and Hanson is working with Pape Dawson to get a vangeline moving and moving quickly.
[40:34] Our goal is to have water into the Maryroads pipeline at the fence line by next November.
[40:41] You can produce 24 million gallons a day when it's ultimately built.
[40:45] We're hoping to get maybe 12 million gallons a day in the system.
[40:50] So where we are today,
[40:56] this region before drought restrictions was using about 130 to
[41:02] 140 million gallons a day on a peak summer day.
[41:05] Everybody can water the yard, industry can blow and go.
[41:09] With all the drought restrictions we've had, I think we're under 100 million gallons a day for the whole system right now.
[41:16] So that's helped.
[41:18] The Maribrow's pipeline, we had some long issues I won't go into on that, but
[41:23] the city had to better understand how to operate that pipeline, because they thought it was falling apart.
[41:29] and it wasn't, they just weren't operating the two booster pump stations to move the water to Cal
[41:35] Island. They were trying to push it from Lake Texana all the way to Owen Steven's treatment plant
[41:41] without operating the booster stations. Well, you can do that when your demand doesn't require you to
[41:47] have that much water. But if you're paying for the water in a take or pay and you're draining your
[41:51] reservoirs, you ought to be taking the water you're paying for and getting it in the pipeline.
[41:58] So start
[41:59] 70 million gallons a day. So we're short, right? Drew Mollie came, I'm going to wrap this up real quick. Drew Mollie came to my office last November, and he said, I want to run a wild idea by it.
[42:13] He said, what if we start just real and well along the Nueces River to get through this drought, and I said, true, we did that 40 years ago.
[42:21] So he goes, what?
[42:23] I said, we did that 40 years ago.
[42:26] Well, fortunately, James Dodson had all of that information
[42:29] of Victoria, and he sent it to us,
[42:31] and we'd sat on with Drew and his staff and Peter
[42:34] and said, look, this is water from emergency purposes only.
[42:38] The water quality is brackish or slightly saline.
[42:44] TDS is above 1,000, sometimes well above it.
[42:46] Chlorides is too high, industry won't like it.
[42:49] but to get through a drought, you can make it work.
[42:53] So they started drilling wells on the lower,
[42:56] what they call the east field.
[42:57] They've now moved up the river,
[42:59] which is where they really should have started focusing
[43:01] because that's where the better water quality is.
[43:02] They got a bed and bags permit for the first well field
[43:04] they're applying for a bed and bags for the next.
[43:07] They think that they could get 28 million gallons a day
[43:11] of water, groundwater into the noises river
[43:14] to help bridge this gap.
[43:16] We've got 70 coming from points north and by the way Texas and I checked this morning is that 76% capacity fills up fast drops fast.
[43:25] It lost 25% capacity in the last three months to then rain and we're going to get some rain.
[43:32] Hopefully it fills up in the spring and we'll have that set at least at 70 will have the emergency wells moving on a banjo line.
[43:40] And there's some other things that the city can talk to you about on reuse and some other things.
[43:47] Barney Davis, I think, is finally starting to, people are starting to understand the value of why are we not looking at Barney Davis.
[43:55] In the past, when Barney Davis was looked at, you had a private entity that owned the plant, owned the plant, and you would have to marry that up with the interest of a municipality.
[44:05] Now, that's kind of tricky.
[44:07] Well, this past year, last two years,
[44:10] CPS Energy, which is San Antonio, bought that power plant.
[44:15] So now we have an opportunity to marry up
[44:18] two big large Texas cities
[44:20] that could look at a large-scale diesel facility.
[44:25] And if I was king for the day, I'd go do a Vangelin.
[44:29] I'd do some wastewater reuse.
[44:31] You've got your emergency wells when you need them.
[44:34] You do Barney Davis, and we're done for a good long while.
[44:41] So I'll end it with that.
[44:43] That's how we got to where we are today.
[44:45] And the good news is, is the council acted today to go get that advantage of water.
[44:56] I don't know if we want to get through all the presentation.
[44:58] Are you sure?
[44:59] Is that okay with you?
[45:00] Okay. Absolutely. Right up, back up here and Brian, kind of go over a couple of things. Yeah.
[45:10] Thank you. And John gave us a great presentation on, you know, kind of regionally, what are water supply where it's coming from historically. I want to share with you for the city of Portland, you know, where we get our water, what does that look like? And then Brian Williams is going to share, you know, plans on the water district moving forward. But we as a city of Portland,
[45:30] And as Mr. Wright mentioned earlier about the last 75 years have been purchasing treated water from the San Patricia Municipal Water District.
[45:37] The City of Portland does not treat any of its water, it just receives treated water and then it distributes it through its system.
[45:43] The San Patricia Municipal Water District operates a number of transmission lines throughout the region and we receive water in two points at the 1 million gallon storage tanks.
[45:55] The first being next to the Waterburger on US-181 in Broadway, and the second by the sports complex.
[46:01] At each of those ground storage tanks, we operate a series of pumps, those pumps in the neighborhood of 5,000 GPM throughout the city.
[46:10] That in turn fills up our elevated storage tanks.
[46:13] The one next to Walmart, and the one in the corner of Moore and
[46:17] Akins, those 500,000 gallon tanks.
[46:19] And so between those four structures that provides both the capacity and the pressure to operate our water system.
[46:26] And again, we do not treat our water, we buy that water treated from the water districts.
[46:30] The only thing that we're doing on a routine basis, whether it's daily, weekly, monthly,
[46:35] checking chlorine residuals, checking for contaminants, any heavy metals, anything along those lines.
[46:41] And at that point, we then distribute the water to each of our customers over 6,000
[46:47] single-family residential customers as well as multi-family and retail customers.
[46:52] The City of Portland does not provide any water to industry for industrial purposes.
[46:57] We do provide water for the office buildings at about three of our industrial partners
[47:03] to use outside of the city limits, but when there is no industrial water, no industrial process
[47:07] water provided to anybody outside the City of Portland.
[47:14] You know, John mentioned during his presentation, you know, kind of the long-term trajectory of water usage throughout the region and Brian and his presentation here in a couple of minutes will do the same thing.
[47:25] I want to share kind of a snapshot of last decade or so of Portland and where we've been in our water usage.
[47:31] We've grown about 25% of water usage from 2015 through 2024-2025.
[47:37] We've got a trend line that kind of smooths out, you know, you see in droughts and periods of COVID through there, but we're generally, you know, keeping track within growth within the city of Portland.
[47:48] We're growing on average with our population growth is in the chart that Mr. Wright showed you about 3% per year and our water usage has generally tracked that.
[47:58] And so, you know, in 2010, 2012, 2014, we're about the 600 million gallon a year range.
[48:07] If it weren't for this last drought, we'd be closer to 850 million gallons per day.
[48:12] So significant increase, and so that's going to require some additional reliance on the
[48:16] Summertime Minus Water District and the City of Corpus Christi to provide an additional capacity.
[48:22] In the end, the trend line, you know, through 2028, we, you know, will exceed 850 million gallons if it weren't for a drought.
[48:30] And so we're, don't see that trend line changing for the foreseeable future.
[48:35] Everything that we're telling us from our residential developers, commercial developers, we expect that to continue.
[48:41] Next
[48:48] up is Brian Williams, a general manager with the San
[48:51] Fish and Water District, and I also want to recognize
[48:54] the Tom Bridges, vice president of the district.
[48:57] It's here tonight.
[48:58] Also Tom, thanks for being here.
[49:00] Brian, I'll turn it over you.
[49:01] Okay, thank you, Randy.
[49:03] Mayor Council, appreciate the opportunity to come this evening
[49:06] and provide a presentation to y'all.
[49:09] We appreciate the opportunity to serve the city of Portland.
[49:13] And I'll try to go through this fairly quick.
[49:16] Again, Tom Bridges is a representative part of the city of Portland on our board.
[49:21] He's also the vice president of our board.
[49:26] Some of this may be a little history, some of the same things you may have heard from John Michael,
[49:32] but at current time, city of Corpus Christi is the regional water provider.
[49:37] San Patricia Municipal Water District was created in 1951 by the state legislature,
[49:42] 50 second state legislature, treated water began flowing from the city of Corpus via the Reynolds
[49:49] aluminum wire 24 inch line to the city of Odom in 1952. That was the first customer of the district.
[50:00] We're going to jump over a little bit. The San Patricia Municipal Water District has two contracts with the city of Corpus Christi, a raw water contract for 46,800 acre foot per year. That contract is in perpetuity. We've also got a treated water contract for 34,760 acre foot per year. That one's good. Another 33 years to 2058.
[50:27] that was renegotiated when Gulf Coast growth ventures came to town.
[50:33] Likewise, San Patricio Municipal Water District has a contract with the City of Portland.
[50:39] We have an obligation to provide .4 gallons per minute per connection.
[50:46] That contract is for 30 years and will take us out to 2043.
[50:50] We just keep numbers, or one number you may want to keep in mind, at 0.4 gallons per minute per connection.
[50:59] I think I'll have 6,635 was the last number we had on our books.
[51:05] So we, San Francisco Municipal Water District has an obligation to, I guess, by TCEQ rules to provide up to 3.8 million gallons per day of water.
[51:17] currently using about $2 million per day on the average, but by contract, by TCEQ rules,
[51:25] it's $3.8 million per day.
[51:32] The status where we're at right now, it doesn't look good.
[51:36] The rains haven't been coming. We're in a drought that's been lasting several years.
[51:41] Chalk Canyon Reservoirs, 10.9%, Lake Corpus Christi's 13.5%,
[51:48] the Nueces Basin combined, 11.6%. Lake Texana's at 76%.
[51:56] And that's the water that's made up from from Texana,
[52:01] 31,000 acre foot, firm, 12,000 acre foot, interruptible.
[52:05] and recently, City of Corpus, I guess did a two year contract for up to 10,000
[52:13] acre foot per year additional from Formosa, that water that John Michael mentioned
[52:17] while ago that was recalled by Jackson County, the city was able to secure it
[52:24] back for another couple of years. Colorado River, 35,000 acre foot per year, those
[52:30] rights or run river rights in junior to LCRA. The firm yield for the city of Corpus Christi
[52:38] is 189,000 acre foot per year. So I think I ran that number somewhere. At 109 million
[52:48] gallons per day, that's 122,000 acre foot. So theoretically, there should be enough water
[52:56] through the firm healed out there from year to year, but we're in the new drought of record,
[53:01] some things, you know, the rains just aren't coming, the lakes aren't filling up. So
[53:06] so where we are, we're in stage three, no lawn watering, but I will say to our customers,
[53:13] some kudos from year to year, looking at January through September of
[53:22] 2024 versus 2025, potable water use has been reduced, 13.3% industrial use has gone
[53:31] down 6.9% raw water that we have a couple of customers purchasing raw water.
[53:38] That has gone up 0.01%, but overall we've got a total reduction in our system of 8%.
[53:46] Portland in particular January through September 2024 through 2025, we've seen a 5.3% reduction in yellow's consumption.
[53:58] Appreciate that.
[53:59] Who does to the city?
[54:04] I've plagiarized a couple of grass charts from the City of Corpus Christi because I think they do provide a lot of information.
[54:11] If anybody is interested, you can go out and look at these at the City of Corpus Christi's
[54:16] website, the Water Dashboard, but I'll just kind of walk through this one quickly and
[54:22] just, she'll have some understanding of it so you can go back and look at it any time
[54:27] it's updated month to month, but top right hand corner, the month of September, the system
[54:35] regional system used 108.99 million gallons per day, 65% of that water came
[54:43] through the Mary Road's pipeline and his John Michael mentioned, it was 70.8
[54:50] million gallons a day, the Nueces River provided 30% or 32.7 million gallons per
[54:57] Day, Lake Corpus Christ.
[55:00] Trustee, those taking directly from me up 5% or 5.4 million gallons per day. So you can always just take that top right hand number and use those percentages if you're curious to see the division of water over on the right hand side. The Mary Road's pipeline provided 51% of the city of Corpus Christi's water to Owen Stevens, which amounted to 55.6 million gallons a day.
[55:27] The 16% came from the Nueces River, so that was 17.4 million gallons a day.
[55:36] The San Patrice Hill, we took about half from each of the two sources, 13% from the Mary Road's Pipeline, which was 14.2 million gallons per day, and from the Nueces River 13.1 million gallons per day.
[55:53] And those two numbers, there's a number that's been kind of out there that we use about
[56:01] 40 million gallons per day.
[56:03] The one thing that this graph really doesn't show, I guess the water that goes to GCGV
[56:10] comes out of the Owen Stevens plants.
[56:12] If you had a little arrow that you put around the right hand side, there'd be, for the month
[56:18] of the September 14.2 million gallons per day
[56:21] that went to GCGV via the Owens Stevens water treatment plant.
[56:28] And just again, that 108.99 million gallons a day
[56:33] equates to 122,000 acre foot back in August.
[56:39] The number was 116 million gallons per day.
[56:42] So the system used 130,000 acre foot per day.
[56:47] And if you think back that firm yield number was 189, but we're in the condition we're in right now
[56:53] It's the firm yield probably needs to be re-looked at in the future
[56:59] The other chart that's out there on the city website
[57:07] Point or around here use have to use the mouse mouse. Okay. Okay. I'll
[57:18] see it popping up now. That's okay
[57:33] The very top line, if you look at it, that's the demand of the system.
[57:40] So if you look at that, there's three humps there and they just duplicated the demand hump
[57:46] over those three years of the future, looking down from, I guess, January 24 on the left
[57:53] hand side.
[57:55] That's the water coming out of the eastern supplies, the Murray Road's pipeline, which is Colorado
[58:00] Carter River and Lake Texana, Western Supplies,
[58:06] Choke Canyon, above that, the darker blue, Choke Canyon,
[58:10] and Lake Corpus Christi.
[58:13] So as you move across to about January 25th,
[58:21] the Western Supplies jumped up.
[58:25] I think they were hoping for 75 million gallons a day.
[58:27] it's closer to 70 million gallons a day, so that decreased the amount that we were having
[58:34] to take out of the western reservoirs, which were going down fairly quick since we weren't
[58:41] getting any rain. Move across to July 25, the city started bringing on the water wells,
[58:50] the eastern water wells. They hope, I think if I can graph, if I remember right, it's showing
[58:58] about 11 million gallons a day that they're hoping to get from those. They aren't showing
[59:03] the eastern wells yet because they don't have the bed and banks permit. But the one item
[59:11] that it is of interest is you move along to the right hand side of that graph and see that
[59:18] it on May of 27 somewhere around there, the dark blue bar doesn't make it up to that
[59:25] demand line. So that's the first month that we're not going to, if the rains don't
[59:32] come, we're not going to be able to meet the demand. So if you move back to the left from
[59:38] that mark six months, that's where you'll get the information that's on the bottom part
[59:47] that graph November of 26. That's the 180 days prior to not being able to meet our demand based off
[59:57] current supplies.
[1:00:00] Some things that we, that's a graph that we can continue looking at, the city of Corpus Christi Updates it on a monthly basis that provides some very good information for planning.
[1:00:15] With some of these things that we're talking about,
[1:00:23] what San Patricia Municipal Water District, as it's been mentioned, we've been a contract customer, the city of Corpus Christi for about 75 years since our beginning. But,
[1:00:37] I guess that was in my mind was working well up until September the 2nd. A lot of things
[1:00:46] happened on September the 2nd. The inner harbor was put on hold. The inner harbor desalination
[1:00:54] plants put on hold. Prior to that happening, San Patricio's plan for moving forward into
[1:01:06] the future was the inner harbour plant was going to provide 30 million gallons a day and that would
[1:01:13] free up some of the western water supply that we could bring it down through our pipelines to
[1:01:20] our treatment plant with the inner harbour desiled plant put on hold that kind of changed the thought
[1:01:31] that we would have some water available from the western source but the plan was in her harbor
[1:01:40] rebuild our old 36-inch line that comes from the Noiseless River and at some point in the future
[1:01:47] as demand dictated the Le Quente desalination plan would go online from the city of Corpus Christi.
[1:01:56] That didn't come to fruition because of the events of September the 2nd came a parent
[1:02:02] that we needed to be thinking about some other options and these are the options that we're
[1:02:09] looking at right now and we had been looking at some of them prior to, we've been looking
[1:02:16] at all of them prior to September the 2nd.
[1:02:18] In the short term, we are working with some of our industrial partners to develop some
[1:02:27] brackish groundwater wells in the close to the vicinity of San Patricia of our location
[1:02:34] there between Gregory and Portland, talking to the Porta Corpus Christi to utilize groundwater
[1:02:42] water rights on some of their properties.
[1:02:45] So between Portocorpus, Christie, Oxy,
[1:02:47] Commerce, and San Patricia, municipal water district,
[1:02:51] we'll have about 6,000 acres.
[1:02:54] There's possibility.
[1:02:56] That's at 1.25 acre foot for acre.
[1:03:00] So per year, you could get about 6 million gallons a day.
[1:03:04] I think there's some hope out there
[1:03:06] that possibly get a temporary variance
[1:03:10] from the San Patricia County Groundwater Conservation District, but the intent for that water to be, to use it expeditiously would be to provide it to our industrial customers, hopefully then that if there was a curtailment put in place by the City of Corpus Christi, we could mitigate that curtailment across the board by putting some more water into our system.
[1:03:36] but thinking of that as a temporary option for us, not long-term, but just through this drought.
[1:03:46] Looking at more of a medium-term option out there, San Patricia has been talking with some
[1:03:54] of the LI Ranch people.
[1:04:01] I'll show the slide in a second, but there's a little,
[1:04:04] little a couple of rectangles that are in the middle of the
[1:04:07] evangel in Laguna. Through talking with them, we share some of
[1:04:13] the same, same thoughts about how to develop that. I think
[1:04:18] the intent would be to go ahead and put the water rights under
[1:04:23] reservation with San Frishio Municipal Water District for
[1:04:28] future development as demand dictates. Probably would make
[1:04:33] sense no more water than that would be that you might dedicate it to the
[1:04:39] municipal side of our business. Our cost model has a delineate between municipal
[1:04:50] and industrial and that may be a good option to consider for some of the
[1:04:55] municipal growth since it does not come in the chunks.
[1:05:00] Like the industrial development does. In the long term, seeing the events of September the second, in Corpus Christi, they had been moving forward with the Lequinto desalination plant. That permit, they have the water rights permit for that. The DCQ discharge permit is at the model being reviewed by the modelers in Austin now.
[1:05:27] So at some point decision will have to be made and I'll show that in a minute but I have
[1:05:36] sent a letter to the City of Corpus Christi requesting that we go into negotiations
[1:05:44] potentially to transfer those permits.
[1:05:48] Going back on those slides, just the brackish ground water, the Port of Corpus Christi
[1:05:54] He has that light green area, about 3,000 acres around the Campbell airport.
[1:06:00] It's continuous to some commerce property that I think that's oxys property in the pink,
[1:06:11] which is continuous to San Patricios in the blue, which is continuous to commerce property.
[1:06:18] there's about 6,000 acres there that we could develop with the intent of it being
[1:06:25] short-term brackish water that would need reverse osmosis but to go into the
[1:06:32] industrial side so that you're not dealing with the TCQ with their
[1:06:36] potable requirements.
[1:06:41] This is the graph that I mentioned. The LI Ranch is about 5,000
[1:06:46] and acres surrounded by the Evangel and Laguna property.
[1:06:52] We are talking with attorneys, landowners,
[1:06:57] far that and looking at that kind of in the medium term
[1:07:01] distance in the future, but probably going ahead
[1:07:04] and moving forward to go under contract
[1:07:07] with reservation rights for that.
[1:07:11] That's the letter that's out there that I sent to Corpus
[1:07:16] is Christy requesting the transfer of the permits
[1:07:21] for the Lakinta desalination plant.
[1:07:27] This is from the permits.
[1:07:29] Sorry, you know, it's turn, turn your head sideways,
[1:07:32] but the far left, right below that blue and green area
[1:07:38] is the San Patricia Municipal Water District.
[1:07:41] Our treatment facility is right above that.
[1:07:43] It's a maximal chemical property
[1:07:45] where the decal plant was proposed to be located coming out of the bottom right-hand corner
[1:07:55] of the blue green area, you'll see a dotted orange line and that if you follow it down
[1:08:02] that goes to the bay, that was the intake point for that decal plant, then if you go to
[1:08:08] the top left of the blue green area, there's a yellow line that goes up across the top
[1:08:15] and down to the bay that is the proposed discharge point for the decal plant.
[1:08:22] That plant was initially thought to be 30 million gallons a day, expandable to 40, depending
[1:08:33] on the city of Corpus Christi, develops things differently than San Patricio Municipal Water
[1:08:41] District.
[1:08:41] heard something about replacement costs. Well that's kind of the way
[1:08:45] the San Patricio Municipal Water District operates with replacement costs. Some of
[1:08:51] y'all may know that when GCGV came to town, they reimbursed the district
[1:08:56] about 60 million dollars for a 48-inch line that feeds their facilities. None of
[1:09:03] that hit our ratepayers. That was all on GCGV and we own the asset and we're
[1:09:10] under contract to provide water to GCGV for the 40 years and I think we would
[1:09:18] probably think similarly with the looking to decal plant that we would be
[1:09:24] looking at some potential new industry that might come there's nothing that
[1:09:30] says that has to be 30 to 40 million gallons a day it could be 10 million gallons
[1:09:35] today which would really I think be a good indicator of seeing how that how the
[1:09:41] bay would react to a desal facility. So I think there's some really good
[1:09:46] options out there for the future. It's probably I know some of some of y'all on
[1:09:51] the city council know right across the road. City Corpus Christi has
[1:09:57] That's an extra-torial jurisdiction.
[1:10:00] The ability to develop some industrial development agreements.
[1:10:06] This would be a water source that
[1:10:08] we would operate to provide far some of that growth that might come with that. And it could
[1:10:15] be industrial, depending on when it would come in the future, it may be driven by municipal
[1:10:21] growth. We just don't know what the future holds.
[1:10:26] I think with that, unless there's some
[1:10:30] questions or if the questions are at the end, I think that's all my presentation.
[1:10:37] Thank you, Brian.
[1:10:38] I appreciate that.
[1:10:40] Next up, we have Nation's River Authority.
[1:10:42] John, are you going to present?
[1:10:45] John Chisholm, Deputy Executive Director.
[1:10:51] Good evening, y'all.
[1:10:53] And I want to emphasize, I'm the new Executive Director, this is my third week, I'm really
[1:11:01] kind of learning by far.
[1:11:03] John's apologized as he couldn't be here with us tonight and I think we let Travis go on vacation so we have to do this.
[1:11:10] I'm here I want to tell you, and I may tell you things you already know so you're welcome to stop me or say yeah that's fine.
[1:11:18] And I'll try to answer any questions that you have when we get to that point.
[1:11:22] I want to tell you a little bit about the New Waisers River Authority some of these things I know you'll know.
[1:11:26] I want to tell you about the new water for South Texas project, Harbor Island.
[1:11:32] and we'll see if we can't make it through there.
[1:11:36] The Noises River Authority started in 1935, primarily a regional water source planning
[1:11:42] agency and we are governed by a 21-member board all appointed by the governor, and I'm
[1:11:50] sure you'll know Eric and many of the others.
[1:11:55] In R.A. is to protect, preserve, try to develop surface water projects.
[1:12:02] We are a part of region in and region L planning groups.
[1:12:09] I think we're the political sponsor for N and our participant in L.
[1:12:16] The new water for South Texas project, the Harbor Island.
[1:12:21] We do intend to procure this through a P3, a public private partnership.
[1:12:27] I'm sure many of the reasons that John pointed out is a good way to go.
[1:12:33] We are anticipating the, or designing the phase one to be a 100 MGD reverse osmosis plant.
[1:12:42] We believe RO is what we'll have to do.
[1:12:44] I think one of the things that makes this particular project interesting and unique and different from some of the others that have been proposed throughout the years, is the intake and the discharge will both be out in a little deeper water section of the Gulf.
[1:13:02] We're going to tunnel out from Harbor Island out into the Gulf.
[1:13:07] I think I remember it's going to be 30 or 45 feet deep, something like that.
[1:13:11] out there, and it's quite a diffuser structure that the discharge will go through.
[1:13:21] And I can tell you from experience, I used to work for the Acton Municipal Utilities
[1:13:26] District in Grandbury, Texas, and was part of a regional RO plant.
[1:13:34] Not everybody knows the brises for ever salty, and you can't drink it without going through
[1:13:39] diesel as well. And so we were part of a consortium of water utilities and cities and river authorities
[1:13:47] and we're a partner in that plant but one of the interesting things that I found was we did
[1:13:54] studies on the discharge because that was a concern about what it was going to do to water quality
[1:13:59] when you discharge the the reject brine back out into the water and the engineers designed a pretty
[1:14:08] simple diffuser type system, similar to what this one will have. A lot of water sampling
[1:14:15] was done around that diffuser array as the plant was in operation, and we found that
[1:14:23] the study's fine, they didn't let me do it. We found that like six to eight feet away
[1:14:29] from the diffuser, the water quality was no different than the ambient water quality in
[1:14:35] the lake. That's how quick this work. So I think this is a wise choice to go out into
[1:14:43] the Gulf and stay away maybe from the Bay or one of the inland places to offshore marine
[1:14:49] work. The P3, I'm sorry, I'm getting off topic. The P3 project is so that the P3 partner
[1:14:58] we'll design build.
[1:15:00] Finance, own and operate the system. There will be an option for, it can transfer over, we
[1:15:07] bought out by NRA at the right time. We anticipate our customers to have to do a 30-year take-or-pay
[1:15:14] water purchase agreement. And then part of the, part of the P3 partnership will also be
[1:15:23] to be getting the electrical distribution to the facility.
[1:15:26] That is one of the hurdles that we have to do.
[1:15:35] The product water pipeline, as you can kind of see it,
[1:15:38] where it's going, it's about six miles of pipeline
[1:15:40] to delivery point in Iran's past, this is our plan right now.
[1:15:45] It's described in the permits and approvals
[1:15:47] that the Port of Corpus Christi already had.
[1:15:50] And I think y'all are aware we already have a least in place
[1:15:52] with the port to transfer all this and let us use all these things that have been done before,
[1:15:57] and I'll get to that in just a minute. The next project as a part of this is the conveyance
[1:16:02] in the distribution pipeline, and boy, this is a big one, and the RFQ responses to the RFQ
[1:16:12] are due tomorrow. So we'll be evaluating that, and I anticipate or John anticipates that we'll
[1:16:18] pick multiple partners to help us with this, but this would be maybe up to an
[1:16:25] 84-inch transmission line to take water from the delivery point north.
[1:16:32] Following roughly some route that would probably parallel, I'm guessing I-37.
[1:16:40] The pipeline would take water all the way up to, and I'm not kidding,
[1:16:47] North East, Vericannon, and out into the Hondo area as well.
[1:16:52] And we have reservation commitments from people in that area.
[1:16:59] So that will start soon.
[1:17:01] I think there will be a pump station at the plant and maybe two more along the way.
[1:17:08] The Harbor Island, I'm sure you're aware of this, 30 acres owned by the port.
[1:17:13] We have a 50-year lease agreement with the port, it can be extended, it gives us the
[1:17:20] right to build, own and operate, it includes all the pipeline easements around that we need,
[1:17:26] the improvements will ultimately, the improvements pipeline saying that will be owned by NRA, and
[1:17:33] the port has responsible for the facility permits and water rights because they already have.
[1:17:38] And those rights are going to convey to us through the lease.
[1:17:42] This is kind of where we are on some of the permitting, of course the lease and easement
[1:17:48] is in place between the port and NRA, the offshore water rights, this application is submitted,
[1:17:55] it's under technical review right now.
[1:17:58] The core of engineers has reviewed or is reviewing the
[1:18:07] environmental impact and then the discharge
[1:18:12] George Permit has been submitted earlier this year.
[1:18:16] Public notice has been complete with TCEQ,
[1:18:21] and we think we're gonna see the draft permit just any day now.
[1:18:25] And then the easements with GLO won't be submitted,
[1:18:29] but they'll be submitted before the end of this year.
[1:18:35] This is kind of the timeline of how things are gonna go.
[1:18:39] There's a little bit of adjustment I wanna tell you.
[1:18:42] The first thing you see there early fall,
[1:18:44] All the P3 procurement, we have not released the RFP out on the street yet.
[1:18:50] We do anticipate that to go out,
[1:18:55] John says by the end of these months.
[1:18:57] I'm thinking probably sometime in November not to contradict him, but
[1:19:01] the P3 procurement will go out and so that's the one thing that we'll have to shift probably a month down the road.
[1:19:09] But everything else is working very well.
[1:19:11] So we anticipate in the plan, the target is that we're going to be delivering water in
[1:19:19] 29.
[1:19:21] I'm going to say late 29 but in up here we say 29 to 32 so phase one will be in 29.
[1:19:31] We have looked at other projects around the world.
[1:19:35] We're seeing that the average cost worldwide and John mentioned this, it's not cheap water.
[1:19:42] it's just not. It's 10 to 15 dollars per thousand gallons. That's what it's
[1:19:47] pretty much worldwide we're seeing. So far everything we're seeing is we're
[1:19:52] going to be in that range as well.
[1:19:57] We are looking at ways to mitigate that.
[1:20:00] This new Water for South Texas project has been designed to align with the, I'm forgetting
[1:20:11] the numbers now, Senate Bill 3, is that right? The just passing and that we're going to be voting on.
[1:20:16] It aligns well with that. It should be eligible for state participation loans.
[1:20:24] We're also pursuing some federal financing as well.
[1:20:31] The BLM has, Bureau of Land Management actually has a diesel program that they're looking
[1:20:37] for a project to fund or to help fund and so we'll be one of the few, I think, that we'll
[1:20:43] be ready to do that.
[1:20:44] Mr. Interjective, the council, just for your reference, we're currently paying $3.80 for
[1:20:59] We have close to 40 million gallons a day in reservation fees currently.
[1:21:06] The city of Corpus is meeting right this minute to consider a 50, 30 to 50 MGD commitment.
[1:21:15] I don't know if they'll do that or not, but it's on their agenda and today is the day that they're supposed to decide.
[1:21:22] For municipal customers like yourself, the reservation fee is 24, 40, an acre foot, and then for some industrial customers which we do have a few, it's basically double that.
[1:21:41] The advantages we really,
[1:21:45] once you can get your head wrapped around the expense of it, which we understand, this thing is expandable.
[1:21:52] We think we can go up to at least 450 million gallons a day, ultimately, on this site.
[1:21:58] We feel like it's environmentally sound.
[1:22:02] I think moving the intake and the discharge out into the Gulf is just a great move.
[1:22:08] And the infrastructure that we're talking about, the conveyance and the transmission lines
[1:22:13] going north, give us a lot of room for future growth in a lot of different areas of Texas.
[1:22:21] And we're getting inquiries from good word Kyle and view the and you know those kind
[1:22:26] of areas because they just don't have a lot of other places to go for water and they're
[1:22:32] interested in this about learning more about this so I think yeah that's all.
[1:22:38] John will be here if he could.
[1:22:39] He might have walked in behind me.
[1:22:40] I don't even know but we'll try to answer any questions that you may have when appropriate
[1:22:45] time.
[1:22:45] Thank you.
[1:22:46] Thank you for your time.
[1:22:47] I appreciate it.
[1:22:53] I'll take just a second here and switch the programs and then we'll have 7Cs at the
[1:23:02] other presentation.
[1:23:03] Rosanna, are you going to do that?
[1:23:08] Mayor, I do want to do just that while we've got a couple of minutes.
[1:23:10] I want to recognize Paul Chewles, who's here at CEO and founder of WaterCycle LLC.
[1:23:18] Paul and his wife, Elizabeth, are actually co-founders.
[1:23:23] It's pretty experts in water, and the good news is there are resident supportments, so
[1:23:27] we appreciate everything Paul has done to kind of help us along with this process as
[1:23:31] well.
[1:23:32] Thank you, Paul.
[1:23:35] Okay, Rosanna.
[1:23:57] Thank you very much for having us here.
[1:24:00] I just want to introduce myself quickly.
[1:24:02] My name is Rosanna Ramirez, the Business Development Director for Seven Seas for the State
[1:24:08] of Texas.
[1:24:09] I have a team of people with me that are from the area as well.
[1:24:13] By the way, I live at the 600 block of Broadway, so Portland resident, and this is very important
[1:24:22] for me.
[1:24:24] I'm learning a lot too, so thank you very much for having me here.
[1:24:28] I'm going to introduce my team.
[1:24:29] So back there is a very important name that you need to remember, and his name is Mark Wenley.
[1:24:36] He's our director for operations in Texas.
[1:24:39] Steve Walden. He is our technical consultant. Steve has many, many, many years of experience
[1:24:48] in the water treatment industry. He worked for 28 years with DCQ, so very much respected name
[1:24:56] in the wild treatment arena.
[1:24:58] Jerry Arnold, our
[1:25:00] This is the development consultant and myself, of course. So, I'm going to go quickly about
[1:25:05] who 7C's is and why are we here. So, who is 7C's water group? So, we treat water. This
[1:25:15] is, we are at water treatment company only. We have about 22 plants in the Caribbean that
[1:25:21] we treat, see water and make portable water for the citizens in the Caribbean islands. 7C's
[1:25:29] was founded in 1997.
[1:25:32] And it was founded to bring water to the Korean allies.
[1:25:35] As you may imagine, they don't have a lot of fresh water.
[1:25:38] So this alienation was a way to bring water
[1:25:42] and to bring more development into the islands.
[1:25:45] Currently, the US Virgin Islands, for example,
[1:25:49] have drink water only from seven seas.
[1:25:52] We are the only source of drinking water
[1:25:54] for all the US Virgin Islands.
[1:25:56] in some of the BVLNs as well, or British Virgin Islands.
[1:26:02] We are the provider of water as a service,
[1:26:05] that's a trademark of seven seas.
[1:26:07] Let me know if it's someone else who uses it
[1:26:09] because it's mine.
[1:26:11] And we have experienced both local and state ground water regulations
[1:26:17] working with state agencies.
[1:26:19] That's why we have, we have, take it, the expense
[1:26:23] and I guess the foreknowledge or for preparation to hire people like Steve to help us with state regulatory issues.
[1:26:36] So what is water as a service?
[1:26:40] So in a nutshell, water as a service is seven c's comes in with design and engineer.
[1:26:48] We finance, we operate and maintain the projects that we engage on.
[1:26:58] So we bring the full financial investment to the projects from the beginning.
[1:27:09] Our execution is between 12 and 24 months and that's not because of how I get this question
[1:27:16] ask a lot, and why is that? It's a little long. It's actually not because of how quickly
[1:27:22] one of these plants can be built, but a lot of the time that's about how long it takes
[1:27:27] to obtain the permits. So, the permit process is what delimits how long these plants are
[1:27:35] going to be built. Of course, we do the plant operations. We do training, staffing, and maintenance
[1:27:43] for the life of the projects.
[1:27:46] We've been doing this since 1997,
[1:27:49] operating all of the projects we engaged in.
[1:27:53] Mark is responsible for Texas and the Caribbean,
[1:27:56] some of the alias in the Caribbean as well.
[1:28:00] He has many, many years since the 90s
[1:28:03] in operation experience.
[1:28:06] And he is the one that is in charge of training the operators.
[1:28:10] So, one of the, get asked how you can ensure that you can run a plant for 30 years, where
[1:28:18] we've been doing it for more than 30 years, in operating the same plants.
[1:28:22] Like I mentioned, we provide all the capital upfront for the project, costing the customers
[1:28:30] zero up front for the parts that seven is engaged in and in part of the water as a service
[1:28:39] model is that we deliver a guarantee quantity and quality of the water. If the quantity and
[1:28:46] quality is not there, we don't get paid. So water has to be delivered at a quantity and quality
[1:28:52] that's contracted.
[1:28:57] So a little bit about brackish water and why brackish water? I get
[1:29:01] I asked that question a lot, imagine that I do this all over the state.
[1:29:06] So by TWAEDB, there's a lot of reservoirs of brackish groundwater in Texas.
[1:29:16] That's mostly unused, and you can imagine why because it's pretty salty.
[1:29:20] We can drink salty water, we can water our crops, we can water our cattle.
[1:29:26] So, that is something that right now, and I heard someone say, you know, back in the
[1:29:32] 90s, whenever they explore desalination, it was expensive, it was, and it was something
[1:29:40] that could not be considered as a viable source of water, as a viable way to obtain potable
[1:29:47] water.
[1:29:48] Now, it's a little bit different.
[1:29:49] that curve of how much decalinate water cost has curved down.
[1:29:56] There's new technologies, new ways that you can do things.
[1:30:00] And the main source of that expense, which is power, has diminished, so plans have become more efficient. And that's why we can bring the salination a little easier and the more cost effective. The other thing that
[1:30:17] So as the SNC has done to be able to bring the goals down is to standardize the operation.
[1:30:23] So as standardizing the operation, it's standardizing how we maintain and how we treat our systems as a system as a network utility.
[1:30:31] We've been able to bring that price down.
[1:30:34] So when I say network utility, what does that mean?
[1:30:38] That means that all of the plans that SNC's runs are part of that network utility.
[1:30:43] And we keep the parts for those plants, pumps, controllers, meters, you name it.
[1:30:52] We keep the critical path parts on hand.
[1:30:56] So if something breaks, it doesn't matter if it's in Alice Texas or is in Aruba, it's
[1:31:02] the same part, the same pump.
[1:31:05] So it gets sent to whatever we need it.
[1:31:09] And I have a story on Alice that was last week, so I can tell you that later.
[1:31:16] So why brackish?
[1:31:18] So it's plentiful, it's a reliable source of water, has lower saline than seawater.
[1:31:25] That's why brackish plants are less costly to build.
[1:31:29] I was given a presentation today in just to give you an idea, I used my hands and I said,
[1:31:35] okay, salty water is up here.
[1:31:38] brackish waters up here. You need very strong materials for a sea water
[1:31:44] desalination plan because the salinity content in the water. If you think
[1:31:49] about it, you brackish groundwater is less salty, so you don't need those
[1:31:53] strong, the stronger materials. So the cost of building a brackish desalination
[1:31:57] plan is much lower, which makes sense.
[1:32:03] And what is brackish versus
[1:32:11] base desalination process.
[1:32:13] So basically we use reverse osmosis to desalinate water.
[1:32:16] If you've never seen a reverse osmosis membrane,
[1:32:18] it looks like a sheet of paper.
[1:32:20] And basically it's a sheet of paper that's rolled up,
[1:32:23] or it's not a sheet of paper.
[1:32:24] It looks like a sheet of paper that's rolled up.
[1:32:26] And it basically filters the water
[1:32:29] and the components of the water from,
[1:32:31] separates the components of the water
[1:32:33] from portable water to the discharge.
[1:32:36] It's proven, it has been used many, many, many times
[1:32:40] all over the world is scalable and it's energy efficient, like I was telling you back in the
[1:32:45] 90s, it was a different story. I started as a row water operator back in 2008. That's how
[1:32:53] I started water treatment and I never deviated from water. I've been doing water treatment since
[1:32:58] and a lot of improvements has come even from 2008. And of course it's suitable for municipal
[1:33:06] I'm not going to go. This is just the Gulf Coast aquifer, just a little snapshot of how
[1:33:13] much water is in there. This is on the TWDB website. Just wanted to show you how much
[1:33:19] the numbers look big, but that's not the TWDB website.
[1:33:27] So a little bit on the city of
[1:33:29] All is in the business model.
[1:33:32] So like I mentioned before, seven seas takes care of all the capital all lay.
[1:33:36] So the city of all is, the plan itself was built with funds from seven seas.
[1:33:42] They did not spend a dime on any of that plan.
[1:33:47] It's a turn key worry free solution.
[1:33:51] I'm going to tell you the little story, I don't know if Mark is going to be too happy about it, but he was the one that solved it.
[1:33:57] But a week and a half ago, one of the pumps
[1:34:00] at the brackish desalination plant in Alice went out.
[1:34:04] All of the blue things break and the pump went out.
[1:34:08] I was sitting at the Bayes and Histories
[1:34:11] or Bayes Foundation banquet with the City of Alice Major.
[1:34:16] And I asked him, oh, hey, did you know that your plant,
[1:34:20] your plant, one of the pumps went out.
[1:34:23] And she turned pale a little bit,
[1:34:25] And then she thought back, and she was like, no, I did it.
[1:34:29] And it was a good, because that's intention.
[1:34:31] That's intention.
[1:34:32] You'll never find out whenever we have a problem.
[1:34:35] And so that was more than $100,000 pump
[1:34:40] that is included in the water right.
[1:34:43] So you only pay for the services delivered.
[1:34:47] We have work class engineering and field service support,
[1:34:51] that's one of the reasons why Mark is here.
[1:34:53] the contrast guarantee quality in quantity.
[1:34:58] If we cannot deliver quality in
[1:35:00] In quantity, we don't get paid. So it doesn't incentive for us to maintain the plant's
[1:35:05] epic performance. Economies of scale are reflected in the plants. The bigger the plant, the better
[1:35:10] the economy of scale. We have, of course, top notch EHS and ESG metrics for our facilities.
[1:35:21] We have, of course, we invest in materials because we run the plants and they have to run
[1:35:27] a big performance if not we don't get paid. So we make sure the materials that we use
[1:35:33] from the very beginning are the best ones. We don't sell the plant and then leave it.
[1:35:40] We have to run it. There's never unforeseen cost because everything in the plant has been
[1:35:49] planned to run for the 30 years and like I said the mayor of all is surprised that she
[1:35:54] actually went through a crisis without even knowing it.
[1:36:01] How do we deliver our projects?
[1:36:04] So we start with project management,
[1:36:06] and this is all the different step and different areas
[1:36:08] of how we deliver the projects.
[1:36:11] We have, of course, a technical staff.
[1:36:13] We have construction management.
[1:36:16] We do the regulation in our permitting.
[1:36:18] We work with the CD to do that
[1:36:21] and work together to do that with the engineer of record.
[1:36:25] That's why we hired people from T.C.Q to help us navigate through those issues.
[1:36:30] Of course, we do all the procurement, there's no, we handle the procurement to build
[1:36:34] in the plant, the shipping and logistics, this is pretty self explanatory.
[1:36:39] And we do continued training for the City of Alice.
[1:36:42] We hire the people that were some of the operators from the plant at the City of Alice.
[1:36:47] This goes, of course, the City of Alice is going to rely about 95% of the water is going
[1:36:51] to be brackish desolimation water.
[1:36:55] So their plant is going to be just running to maintain it.
[1:36:59] Their surface water plant.
[1:37:02] And we hire them, we send them about a month
[1:37:04] to the Caribbean to be trained.
[1:37:06] We do not build custom plants.
[1:37:09] And let me tell you why, because usually whenever
[1:37:12] you go and buy custom, custom means expensive.
[1:37:16] You go get a custom car and put some organic car
[1:37:19] and get some custom things.
[1:37:20] You're going to get expensive, nice looking car.
[1:37:23] We want something that is going to be reliable, is going to be responsive, is going to be there
[1:37:29] for 30 years and it's not going to go anywhere, but it's doable, it's actually affordable.
[1:37:35] The things that we do to that is, again, an offers radio, been doing it for 30 years and
[1:37:42] we have improved the process year after year after year.
[1:37:49] So how do we go into delivering a project?
[1:37:54] So we start with initial discussions.
[1:37:56] What do you need?
[1:37:59] We're not going to tell, I'm never going to come to a city
[1:38:02] or to a municipality or a customer and say, hey,
[1:38:05] let me tell you what you need.
[1:38:07] Because you need this and this and this.
[1:38:09] Nobody knows the city better than you do.
[1:38:11] Although I live in Portland, so I may have a vote.
[1:38:15] But we're never going to do that.
[1:38:16] because nobody knows the city better than the council
[1:38:19] better than the city manager.
[1:38:22] We lay out the distribution system in the ideal location
[1:38:25] for the seawater or brackish water or plant.
[1:38:31] And this is all at the beginning, a front.
[1:38:34] Remember, there's no contract, there's no signature,
[1:38:37] there's no at a penny lay down at this time.
[1:38:43] The, we go through the brackish hydrology study, that's commissioned by seven C's.
[1:38:52] Whenever that happens, we come back with a price based on conservative estimates.
[1:38:58] Basically, what we do, we look at the area, the hydrology in the area, and we give you a price
[1:39:05] range.
[1:39:05] We say, look, with what we know now, you prices from this to this is not going to be from $10
[1:39:16] to $24. It's going to be a very tight price range because we are very confident that we know
[1:39:23] what's down there. That's why we have people like Steve Walden that help us with that.
[1:39:29] Then, at that point, whenever we have that price range, we sign the water services agreement.
[1:39:37] When that happens, as a contract, when that happens, we go full throttle.
[1:39:41] We get funded for projects in about four weeks.
[1:39:44] So in four weeks, we have all the funds to start working on drilling a test well.
[1:39:50] Whenever we drill a test well, a test well is going to tell us exactly what's down there.
[1:39:55] And that's when you know that you know.
[1:39:58] Before that, you have goodest.
[1:40:10] Let's say the pricing, we stick the straw down there, we drill the well, and the water comes out horrendous, is 10 times saltier than we thought it was going to be, we blend Steve, and we say, you know what? Now, the prices are not going to be, you know what?
[1:40:30] what we told you is going to be 15% higher.
[1:40:35] At that point, our contracts, and you can read it in the contracts that are out there as well.
[1:40:40] At that time, our contracts have an out.
[1:40:43] At that point for seven cities and for our customers, we can say no.
[1:40:49] We can say no. What? Thank you very much.
[1:40:52] Nice to have done a business with you, but we stop here.
[1:40:56] We take that drilling of that well as a risk of doing business because we don't want an unhappy customer.
[1:41:05] We cannot afford in Texas to have an unhappy city.
[1:41:10] Why? Because you all talk to each other and you all know each other.
[1:41:13] We're going to TML next week and we know that everybody's going to talk.
[1:41:17] That's why we have a great story in Alice.
[1:41:20] Alice is the success story for seven seas in Texas is the first one and you can go talk
[1:41:27] to them and ask what has happened there and how happy they are.
[1:41:31] They are the only ones that can water everything, they can wash everything, they can do whatever
[1:41:36] they want with the water.
[1:41:39] So at that point the price is finalized, then we begin construction of the production wells.
[1:41:46] We start working on the permits, as you know, you cannot permit a well if it's not real, so that's whenever you start drilling and permitting the wells.
[1:41:55] At that point also we hire the people that are going to be able to operate the plant.
[1:42:00] The construction of the plant in Alice took six months.
[1:42:05] The actual permitting in everything else is what took the longest.
[1:42:10] So in six months there's a plant that our operators can start practicing it.
[1:42:16] Then it comes a commissioning and then the delivery of a contracted quality and quantity
[1:42:22] and quality of water.
[1:42:23] And that's whenever you pay your first bill when water starts running.
[1:42:30] And that's a kind of, in a nutshell, what the water services.
[1:42:36] So what's the future of the salination in Texas?
[1:42:38] So, it can be a reliable source of water, groundwater, and when I'm talking, I'm talking
[1:42:47] groundwater.
[1:42:48] Texas has many alternatives for seawater and brackish groundwater desalination and
[1:42:53] source.
[1:42:55] The P3 business model can help communities without funding up and also with speed.
[1:43:01] The state of Texas has made big strides into funding water projects as we know
[1:43:08] Proposition 4 is coming up but we need them today actually we need them we
[1:43:15] needed them five years ago but that's another story we we can help that
[1:43:21] fund fund that gap in a short amount of time and of course we offer resiliency
[1:43:29] see groundwater is something that's been there for a long time and I'm going to show you.
[1:43:34] And this alienation applies plans can provide our reliable source of water and water supply.
[1:43:44] And that's all I have.
[1:43:45] Is there any questions, comments?
[1:43:49] That's our last presenter if you would like to ask questions now.
[1:43:52] All right.
[1:43:55] That was ready to go.
[1:43:56] Yeah.
[1:43:57] So what are you selling water?
[1:43:59] What's the right you're selling to Alice right now?
[1:44:01] The rate we're selling to Alice is less than $3 per thousand dollars.
[1:44:07] I don't know the exact number.
[1:44:10] That is less than $3 per thousand dollars.
[1:44:13] And that's public information.
[1:44:19] Most of the questions are to these other folks.
[1:44:22] Any other questions for Rosanna?
[1:44:25] I just want to, I
[1:44:29] guess state our intentions with seven scenes and maybe rainy paraphrase it better.
[1:44:33] But Rosanna is a Portland resident and she cares deeply about our community and she reached out to assist us in our future water potential future water needs.
[1:44:44] We've had a long discussion with seven C's and they know that we will 99% we will go out for request for qualifications and we will seek the best qualified candidate to help us if we go down this path.
[1:44:58] and then...
[1:45:00] We understand that, and they encourage that. So thank you again for being here and giving us the information that will help us make the right decision for Portland. And, like I said, I live here. So please don't hesitate to reach out. Feel free to reach out through Hathier. Thank you. Thank you.
[1:45:21] in terms of permits or received or what's the current for issues.
[1:45:27] How long before basically you're able to provide water?
[1:45:32] So if the taking the example of Alice, if the plant is built, that's not very far.
[1:45:38] How long do you take us, Mark?
[1:45:57] And there's also a schedule to introduce new water into a water system.
[1:46:02] So you have to do it gradually to not impact or negatively impact the
[1:46:08] Distribution system. So we had that schedule built and worked with the engineer of record and
[1:46:14] In the city of Alice to introduce the new water into the system. By the way, our old water is that quality water
[1:46:20] So so that's that's one of the reasons why you have to be careful when introducing. It's a great water
[1:46:26] I think you know city of Alice is a very interesting example and
[1:46:34] because I'm a friend with the mayor there.
[1:46:37] I have been involved in their project from early 2019.
[1:46:43] Kathleen Weiss and Berger and I actually went down to the city of Alice, and
[1:46:47] they actually had a big presentation.
[1:46:49] It was a full day presentation just for the two of us.
[1:46:51] And that's where I first met Bill Norris, who was their engineer and
[1:46:56] Bill is now retired, but he's in private practice now his own business.
[1:47:01] and he is very instrumental in the Texas D Salis Association.
[1:47:06] So he is also here tonight and we fully intend to type every expert, you know,
[1:47:11] that we can as we make these decisions.
[1:47:14] And so, thank you Bill for that.
[1:47:16] And I know we've had a lot of discussions on what we may do differently or what we need
[1:47:22] to continue to do in the city of Dallas.
[1:47:25] So, they were the processor, they were the prototype and I know that we have a lot of things
[1:47:30] that we learned from that and very appreciative of that opportunity.
[1:47:34] Thank you.
[1:47:35] Thank you.
[1:47:37] All right, Bill.
[1:47:38] Who's who?
[1:47:39] John Michael.
[1:47:40] John Michael.
[1:47:42] Mr. Michael, please step forward.
[1:47:46] You made a point that I definitely agree with about the notion of rate modeling being something
[1:47:54] that's going to have to really be looked at.
[1:47:55] And I want to share some information that I extracted from the St.
[1:48:02] Christian County tax collector.
[1:48:04] It took her about two weeks to compile all the data.
[1:48:08] But I got the data this afternoon.
[1:48:09] And the fact is that, you know, as we know, industry,
[1:48:13] according to Brian Williams, uses 70% St.
[1:48:16] Christian County's water.
[1:48:19] And, you know, that's where the majority of the growth is projected to be.
[1:48:23] but if you go back and look at the tax benefits that San Patricio County
[1:48:30] industry has received since 2010. From tax abatements and 312 agreements and
[1:48:38] 313 agreements with all of the various taxing entities and this does not
[1:48:42] include future look which is even larger than the past. San Patricio County
[1:48:49] industry has benefited to the tune of $1 billion, $50 million in relief from local taxes.
[1:48:59] And that number does not include the abatement agreements that are in place that will relieve
[1:49:06] them even further as these incredibly large industrial pieces get built.
[1:49:12] And so, the notion that we've undervalued water and that we need to make sure that as we invest in water infrastructure, I think that collectively, regionally, it's important that industry and governments understand the benefits and tax relief that has been essentially, when you would bake taxes for one entity,
[1:49:42] you put the tax burden on others and that's it's a statewide impact but it is
[1:49:47] local that's the number local to this county that's the number of taxes that
[1:49:54] our county industries have not had to pay it's in favor of that since 2010
[1:50:00] And then the numbers have grown as we've gone forward. And so, how would a new model, costing model, be implemented with respect to long-term regional water investment? Do you have any ideas how that might work? Well, you know, I mean, that's, that's the challenge. What you just said about industry coming to San Pat County is so true. I remember when the total assess value of San Francisco County was like, I don't know, $2 billion or something, that sounds like a big number.
[1:50:29] It was $3 billion when I got on the Texas support.
[1:50:31] It wasn't much, right?
[1:50:33] And so the drainage district didn't have a whole lot to operate on.
[1:50:37] Now they have the surplus.
[1:50:39] So you got to balance jobs, growth, income, investment into your community.
[1:50:46] All those things that new industry brings.
[1:50:51] But the person that's on Elm Street that's lived in Portland for their entire life gets hit
[1:50:59] with a water bill, and they're struggling to make payments.
[1:51:04] No elected official wants to raise water rights, right?
[1:51:07] You guys want to raise water rights.
[1:51:10] Sometimes, under the old model, when you had industry come in,
[1:51:13] if you're not investing in future water supply,
[1:51:16] it actually can help you keep your water right down, right?
[1:51:19] Sometimes even maybe even lower it.
[1:51:23] But we haven't added the real expensive stuff yet.
[1:51:27] But we're living off of reservoirs that we're built and paid for.
[1:51:32] Our raw water cost is a little over $1,000 to replace that cost per thousand today.
[1:51:39] It's going to be $10 up.
[1:51:42] So that's a big disparity.
[1:51:45] So if you're a resident that's living here in a new industry comes in, there's no impact
[1:51:54] be associated with how you replace this new water, that cost, when we weren't growing
[1:52:02] it worked great.
[1:52:02] You just put the cost in, you start the pot and outcome a new number.
[1:52:05] And so we would go on up on a little bit of incremental rate, it was tolerable, it was good.
[1:52:11] But if we get into a situation where we're looking at big facilities that need 10 MGD, 30
[1:52:17] MGD, I've heard crazy numbers out there, and there's a lot of pen up industry waiting
[1:52:22] for these decisions to get made to decide whether or not they want to come here.
[1:52:27] I'd like to see a bunch of them come here.
[1:52:29] I love industry, but we got to figure out this rate model on how we go forward.
[1:52:34] Bill, I'm not the guy that do that.
[1:52:36] There are people that do that for a living, but I think you need to apply at least some
[1:52:42] kind of impact fee, just like you do with new developers who are coming in.
[1:52:47] You don't put that burden on your existing customers.
[1:52:49] They're helping make up that difference.
[1:52:51] So you get the benefit of both worlds.
[1:52:55] They're here because of cheap energy, access to deep water,
[1:53:00] good transportation network, good labor force.
[1:53:03] The cost of water is minimal.
[1:53:07] So increasing that cost, I don't think is gonna run them off.
[1:53:09] I had the plant manager at Oxy over here
[1:53:11] told me in the last drought of 2011,
[1:53:14] I asked him, I said, what's your threshold for pain?
[1:53:16] He came from Louisiana, they had plenty of water.
[1:53:19] He said, I'll pay $9,000 if I know I can get it.
[1:53:24] So, I'm not a rate model guy, what you said was exactly true.
[1:53:29] Well, it needs to get factored into the equations.
[1:53:31] I just don't know how that happens, and particularly with long-term contracts.
[1:53:36] And I do have a question that segues into a question for NRI, and that is, how do you, you know,
[1:53:45] So if you're producing, see what a diesel and you're piping a big percentage of it through
[1:53:53] San Patricia County to San Antonio, are our rate payers going to be hit with the cost
[1:53:58] of that pipeline going to San Antonio?
[1:54:00] Are you going to have some distinguishing price difference for feeding because we don't
[1:54:06] need a pipeline to San Antonio to sort of our needs and our rate payers shouldn't have
[1:54:10] to pay for that pipeline.
[1:54:11] How are you going to handle the cost model for that kind of infrastructure?
[1:54:17] I don't have a firm answer for you yet, but I think the outline that you just gave is what we're going to have to do.
[1:54:27] There's going to have to be some cost of service, modeling done, be exactly what you said sort of that.
[1:54:34] you know, it would be unreasonable or it would be very hard to expect, let's just say Portland
[1:54:41] to pay the same rate as the, you know, the water that's being delivered, let's say in
[1:54:45] Kyle.
[1:54:46] There's a tremendous amount of income.
[1:54:47] We got your recorded on that, now.
[1:54:49] Pardon?
[1:54:49] I said we have you on record.
[1:54:51] Yeah, well, maybe that's why John said we so he can go, no, he didn't know what he's talking
[1:54:56] about.
[1:54:56] But I think you're right.
[1:54:58] And we've talked about that cost of service.
[1:55:00] And how we'll do that. It's very complicated. I think John's right that, you know, you've got, in his example, you know, legacy $1,000 water and we're looking at $10,000 or $15,000 water now. You've got to mix all that up to come up with what your water rates are going to be.
[1:55:22] I'm seeing groundwater up in the San Antonio area being sold for $11,000 and $12,000 and they're just glad to get it.
[1:55:31] So that's kind of what we're seeing, but yes, there's a lot of rate model work that has
[1:55:35] to be done.
[1:55:36] That's the way it's into a question I bet for Brian Williams.
[1:55:43] So Brian, you showed the letter and your request for the transfer of Corpus Christi's
[1:55:49] decal permit to San Frisier County Water District.
[1:55:52] And I wanted to confirm, you and I have had a separate conversation about, you know, that
[1:55:59] I ask the question, do you anticipate having to reimburse Corpus Christi for all of their
[1:56:06] cost in getting those permits up to where they are today?
[1:56:11] I'll let you answer the question.
[1:56:16] I guess it would depend on where that, if it was a new industry that was taking the water
[1:56:23] where it was located, if the city of Corpus Christi were able to reimburse themselves through
[1:56:31] an industrial development agreement, possibly night, probably night. If it was outside that
[1:56:39] ETJ and industrial development agreement, I think we would probably figure out the way to put
[1:56:45] that cost on that new potential industry that they could repay that, a portion of that to the city
[1:56:52] a court of electricity, some of the money that the city had fronted through the permit
[1:56:59] development process.
[1:57:00] You also spoke to your presentation about, you know, the potential investment of this
[1:57:07] in this plant would likely be paired with a new industry coming to the area and using that
[1:57:15] water, if you will.
[1:57:17] I mean, is that also, I mean, that seems to be a more fair and likely approach to it to me.
[1:57:24] I mean, I appreciate the fact that Exxon ponied up $60 million for a pipeline when they came to town.
[1:57:32] But in retrospect, when you look at the tax benefit numbers that they've already benefited from,
[1:57:40] it's a drop in the bucket, particularly when we're looking at the city court
[1:57:44] electricity that stopped progress on a one point,
[1:57:47] well, ended up being put out there as a $1.2 billion
[1:57:50] investment, you know, once again,
[1:57:54] it seems to me that it's back to that right model
[1:57:56] question and who the customer is and who's going to pay for it.
[1:58:00] I mean, I think that, you know, our interest collectively
[1:58:04] as the city council is not only securing long-term water supply,
[1:58:08] it's reliable, but protecting our right payers
[1:58:11] in the best way possible.
[1:58:14] I think we've demonstrated that over the years
[1:58:17] and the way before I got here, I've been here 13 years,
[1:58:21] but that's been the way that we've developed
[1:58:24] our system over the years prior to GCGV,
[1:58:30] putting up the money for a 48-inch line,
[1:58:32] Occidental Chemical, put up the money
[1:58:34] to replace a 24-inch line back to Corpus,
[1:58:37] I think it was 11.5 million at the time,
[1:58:40] before that back in 2000 when the water district built plant sea, the membrane treatment plant,
[1:58:49] those costs were, I think, 50% of that was fronted by the Occidental Chemical,
[1:58:57] commerce, air lequid, and the municipal customers had half of that plant dedicated to them
[1:59:04] and they picked up the other half through the rate model.
[1:59:06] So that's I just the way we've developed over the years and I think that's a fair way to the
[1:59:12] industry pays their way through the system.
[1:59:16] Thanks.
[1:59:16] I appreciate all of y'all coming tonight.
[1:59:20] It's been informative and I just wish we'd solved all the problems.
[1:59:29] I do have a question from Brian though.
[1:59:34] Most of your presentation tonight is a matter of fact short term potential.
[1:59:38] you mentioned Porto Corpus Christioxic Comores, your own district, long-term reservation for future
[1:59:46] production, your reference industry, long-term your reference industry. Again, our concern is
[1:59:54] water for our residential and business in Portland. I know
[2:00:00] I know that for years, our mayor coalition has been talking to y'all about water, particular development of the abangeline, potentially in getting in contract with the court, with Harbor Island before the NRA did. I mean, these are all ideas. So, what Brian, are you doing? It comes back to looking, and I guess that's where I'm having to gravitate now.
[2:00:29] to take care of our own interests because I don't see that interest being looked at at
[2:00:38] the municipal level either at the rate model or at new, you know, how we're going to
[2:00:43] pay for new water sources and we seem to be losing that municipal component.
[2:00:49] And one time in the future, I asked you this question and you said, first come, first serve.
[2:00:54] Well, how do you first come if you are incrementally growing as a city and, you know, that small incremental growth and then how are you protecting the water rates for current existing cities without having to pass on that new water cost?
[2:01:14] How are you protecting us?
[2:01:17] Let me talk about a couple of things there.
[2:01:19] I guess first off, I would say when I think Randy mentioned that y'all are paying $3.80
[2:01:27] per thousand, that's based on two million gallons a day.
[2:01:32] If you decide to go to another provider of water, someone's going to have to pick up, I guess
[2:01:40] that delta that the TCEQ requires you to have, so you'll be paying, you'll be having to provide water for 3.8 million gallons of water a day.
[2:01:52] So, if you run through the numbers, trying to do apples and apples instead of $3.80, city of Portland is paying about $2,000 to make 3.8 million gallons available for the requirements of the TCEQ.
[2:02:06] So that's something you need to be thinking about.
[2:02:09] And then also mentioned short and long in the medium term, as I mentioned, we're looking
[2:02:15] talking with the L.I. ranch folks, and I guess that's, I probably got the first two nickels
[2:02:23] I ever made in my pocket, I'm pretty tight.
[2:02:26] But that's why we are in discussions with the L.I. ranch.
[2:02:31] We're not paying the equivalent, not planning on paying the equivalent of $169 million for that water that might be available from the LI ranch.
[2:02:42] What we're talking about is reserving that, going ahead, and probably I think there's a good argument to be made to assign that to the municipal signs.
[2:02:52] So I think that's probably where we're looking at in the future.
[2:02:55] Okay. Thank you.
[2:02:58] Any other questions?
[2:03:00] Okay. It sounds 703. We've been going here now for two hours and we're going to actually
[2:03:07] be starting our regular city council meeting in just a few minutes. We're going to take
[2:03:11] a break. But before we do, I do want to also recognize Charles Ring is here tonight with
[2:03:16] us from the groundwater conservation group. And I know you'll probably speak to us in our
[2:03:21] area in our regular council meeting. And I want to thank you for being here. I know this
[2:03:25] This is an important topic for y'all too, so thank y'all very much.
[2:03:30] Thank you everyone for coming tonight.
[2:03:32] As you know, this is a very important topic for not only the City of Portland but for
[2:03:38] our region, so this is the start of what we hope to be a very quick resolution on how we're
[2:03:45] going to provide water and water security for the City of Portland.
[2:03:49] Thank you Commissioner Yardley for being here tonight too.
[2:03:51] Thank you everyone, spouses included a lot of people are here so appreciate it and we're
[2:03:59] going to take just a very brief probably 10 minute recess or we'll conclude our workshop
[2:04:04] now and then we will go into our city council meeting.
[2:04:09] Thank you all very much, good night.