Report: Rural Texas receives less than 1% of state bonds for water projects

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Rural areas in Texas receive only a fraction of one percent of the state’s water feature project bonds, far less than lawmakers predicted nearly a decade ago when the program was designed, a status report shows.

The Texas Water Development Board is charged with billions of state dollars to issue bonds, provide loans and disburse grants for water supply, sewage treatment, flood control and conservation projects. One of its programs, the State Water Implementation Fund for Texas, or SWIFT, issues bonds to provide low-cost loans to finance water supply projects.

But although this program has committed $9 billion to help fund projects in the state water body since 2015, the agency fell short of its legislative goal of providing 10% of those funds to rural communities and agricultural water conservation, according to a Texas Sunset Advisory Commission staff reportwhich assesses the performance of state agencies.

Instead, only 0.17% went to rural communities between 2016 and 2020.

The report says the agency needs to strengthen its outreach efforts in rural and economically disadvantaged areas of the state and better track all of its programs to understand the barriers small communities face in applying.

Sparsely populated rural areas find it difficult to apply for loans, said Texas water finance experts and water managers in rural communities, because they lack the technical expertise to submit a demand. Some don’t even know the programs exist. Moreover, these communities often do not have the population, political support, or local matching funds to take on heavy debt, even with low interest rates or favorable terms.

Becky Brewster ran for mayor of Van Horn, 1,941 inhabitantspartly on the promise to fix infrastructure – water pipes broke frequently and the city had to issue a boil water advisory to residents every time.

“I was starting to get frustrated that we weren’t going anywhere,” she said. “It just seemed to get worse.”

But to replace the lines, money was needed. Grants were hard to get, while loans were hard to apply for, she said.

“It’s kind of like sending your kid to college,” Brewster said. “You don’t have enough money to pay it directly, but you don’t qualify for any grants. So [rural] communities often find themselves in this kind of situation. You’re just a little stuck.

In one 2020 Report to State LegislatorsTWDB said all rural, irrigation, reuse and conservation projects that submitted full SWIFT applications have been funded.

TWDB communications manager Kaci Woodrome said in a statement that the agency receives significantly fewer SWIFT requests from rural communities than from large cities. Other programs are better suited to rural areas, she wrote, which may result in less demand for the SWIFT program from smaller entities.

“The TWDB works with communities to assess these financial considerations and attempts to offer the best options available to meet community needs,” Woodrome wrote.

But rural community leaders said the barriers span many of the agency’s programs. After Brewster took office, Van Horn hired an engineering firm to assess its water infrastructure needs and calculate an estimated cost — which totaled many times what the city could possibly bear in debt.

Rather than applying through SWIFT, Van Horn applied for a different loan program from TWDB for drinking water projects that offers loan forgiveness. Even that, Brewster said, was a difficult undertaking and could not have been done without a contractor provided by the Rio Grande Council of Governments.

“We don’t have staff who have the time or the capacity to do that,” Brewster said.

The fund is not meeting the legislative target

The SWIFT fund has also struggled to provide aid for water reuse and conservation projects, which lawmakers had hoped would account for a fifth of the fund’s loans. The fund also missed these targets: only 4% of the loans were for reuse and 3% for conservation projects.

“TWDB is aware that the targets have not been met despite significant outreach efforts,” TWDB spokesperson Woodrome wrote.

She said the agency is holding online and in-person workshops, meeting directly with communities, and working with other agencies to try to reach the communities that need it most.

Water experts said the agency has done a good job pushing the money out the door, but rural projects need more attention. At the same time, the agency is limited by its own processes, said Carlos Rubinstein, former chairman of the Texas Water Development Board, who is now a principal consultant for RSAH2O, an environmental regulation and compliance consultancy.

“[The board] expects the projects to be quite conceptually developed, including how you’re going to pay off the debt,” Rubinstein said. “And if [communities] not being able to see the application through the process, there is not much the board can do. »

Smaller communities need more help — whether from nonprofits, private foundations, or others — to do what he calls pre-development work. Otherwise, he said, these communities will continue to fix one thing at a time when something breaks in their water infrastructure and never fix system-wide problems.

“We need to avoid band-aid patches,” Rubinstein said.

Jennifer Walker, deputy director of the Texas Coast and Water Program at the National Wildlife Foundation, has worked on Texas water supply issues for several years and said she agrees with Sunset staff’s recommendation. Commission to require TWDB to develop an outreach plan to reach communities. who do not require financial assistance.

“We know that big cities with specialized staff and retainer consultants are applying, and that’s great, but are we really reaching all parts of the state?” says Walker. “I think everyone knows that’s a question that needs to be answered. But it’s really time for [the agency] to do this.”

Rural communities are absent

In Presidio County, home to Marfa in West Texas, the local groundwater district is responsible for ensuring there will be enough water in the West Texas Bolson and Igneous aquifers to support development in the future, but currently has little information on how much water each landowner uses, in part because many residents have their own water wells.

The district is supposed to monitor water quality and aquifer levels, but in reality, it doesn’t have the money to do so effectively, said Trey Gerfers, chairman of the County Groundwater Conservation District. presidio.

Local officials recently asked the TWDB for money to build groundwater monitoring wells to help them do just that, which Gerfers says would allow the district to approve well permits based on accurate data. , rather than what he says is currently happening:[We’re] promising the moon and hoping that everything will be fine.

But the TWDB application process is very technical. Smaller rural areas like Presidio County don’t have the same level of expertise to compete with big cities, he added.

“In a place like Houston, which has a room full of people who can apply for this stuff, they get hundreds of millions. [of dollars] of the state,” Gerfers said.

Without outside help from nonprofit groups, they would not have been able to apply for the funds, he said.

Rural communities in Texas also often depend almost exclusively on aquifers, and Vanessa Puig-Williams, director of the Texas Water Program for the Environmental Defense Fund, said TWDB programs do not provide specific funding for aquifer management.

“It’s an important piece of that conversation that’s missing in rural Texas because aquifers are infrastructure in rural Texas,” Puig-Williams said.

More than 70% of Texas is currently experiencing severe drought, according to the US Drought Monitor, which has already contributed to wildfires across the state. Droughts tend to put pressure on groundwater resources: during the severe drought of 2011, groundwater provided nearly two-thirds of the state’s increased water use.

Gerfers said he fears that aquifers serving rural communities will be under strain in the future as climate change continues to drive higher average temperatures and intensifies droughts.

“With the growing population in Texas, with the prospect of longer, hotter, drier summers, more intense droughts, I mean, we’re lying to ourselves if we don’t get this under control now while we have the chance. “said Gerfers. noted.

Disclosure: Environmental Defense Fund financially supported The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the journalism of the Tribune. Find a full list here.

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