The TWDB visits North Texas

Transcript

L'Oreal Stepney - Board Member, Texas Water Development Board

The Texas Water Development Board-we're here in Dallas today. We're having a traveling board meeting. And tomorrow, our board meeting will be in McKinney, Texas. So, we're excited to be here present today in North Texas. I grew up in Dallas. I spent my entire childhood here, so I have an emotional connection to the city. And so, it's very important for me to see flood mitigation projects to help prevent the loss of life and property for the city.

Brooke Paup - Chairwoman, Texas Water Development Board

I grew up in Plano, Texas, just up the road, and when I was a little girl, this area was a two-lane dirt road and just farms. So, the growth is really tremendous and just the municipal demand for water is tremendous. Well, it's lovely to kind of dust the Board off and get out of Austin and really see where our projects are and how they benefit the constituents and ratepayers and see where these tax dollars are going.

Dan Buhman - General Manager, Tarrant Regional Water District

Fort Worth is the 12th largest city in the nation now and continues to grow. In the 11-county area, 65,000 people are moving into our service area every year. So, that's a new city every year that we need to supply water.

We supply wholesale water to our customers, which means we pump water from a lake directly to our customers. They then treat it and deliver to homes. Those homes use that water, and then it gets treated and put back into the river. And at that point, what do we do with it? Well, we still have access to that water. And so, we pick that up and we put it through several thousand acres of wetlands that we have built. And those wetlands, they clean that water. Now, they don't clean it to drinking water standard, but they take out all sorts of nutrients and things that are bad for human consumption. And by the time they come out of the wetlands, that water looks pretty clean. You don't even realize this is a water supply project, and it also creates something amazing and beautiful and good for the environment and for people.

About 20 years ago, the water district was looking at their next project. What is the next thing we need to do? And it was clear that we had water in two of our lakes, Cedar Creek and Richland Chambers reservoirs, that we had the water but needed more pipeline. We needed more ability to deliver that water. And at the same time, the City of Dallas said, hey, we have this lake, Lake Palestine, that we need to connect into our system. And if you just look at a map, they're near each other. The pipelines potentially could go in the same direction. And so, through some really good coordination between the two entities, we said, "What if we were to do this together?" And hence the name of the integrated pipeline, we are integrating these two systems. And then, we worked together with the Water Development Board on bringing in financing at lower rates, and that saved the customers millions and millions of dollars.

Larry N. Patterson, P.E. - Executive Director, Upper Trinity Regional Water District

The North Texas area of Texas is among the fastest-growing areas in the nation. Our population has grown over 50 percent in the last 10 years.

Lake Ralph Hall was the first reservoir permitted by the State of Texas since 1985. This lake will provide service to approximately 400,000 new residents. The planning for Lake Ralph Hall was initiated in 2002 and, working jointly with the Water Development Board, we've been able to fund the planning, the permitting, the design, and now construction. It's vital to the future of this region to meet the needs.

We successfully completed a mile-and-a-half-long bridge. All the utilities are relocated. We've cleared portions of the inundated area, and they'll be able to see construction of the dam, which is approximately 60 percent complete at this point.

Our activities with the Texas Water Development Board have allowed us to properly manage the cost of water to our members and customers.

Sarah Standifer - Director, Dallas Water Utilities

Part of the opportunity to partner with the Water Development Board is to bring our folks and their folks together. So, we went out and we saw some funded projects that we used from the Flood Infrastructure Fund. We saw a Dallas floodway extension project, some new levees that we're going to put in place. We saw a couple of pump stations that are actually bringing all the water from outside in the community into the river to take it on down south. And we also got to see a little bit of some natural wetlands, which are green infrastructure, kind of a newer concept. So, different types of maintenance of applications, and to see how you can introduce flood infrastructure from both a hardscaping and a softscaping perspective.

Dallas is in the process of building what a lot of communities in the future will build. You've got to put drainage somewhere, and you're going to have to go underground. So, the tunnel that we went in and saw today has been in the planning process since the '70s. It was funded in early 2006. And we've actually got a Flood Infrastructure Fund request out as part of their grant and loan program. It'll take five miles underground, and it will move water from our central business district, our East Dallas communities, and move it directly to the river. The next phases will improve the pipes through the neighborhoods, and you will see over $4 billion worth of property protected when we're done with the project. I think that as the state has moved towards flood infrastructure planning, it's a new concept, kind of, across the country.

But the Water Development Board's really taken a step forward. We've got regional flood planning groups, and to see those things right in person and to understand that each community is different, each community has different needs, but that, as a whole, the has got to make those investments so that we can prepare for the future and keep our residents and businesses protected.

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