Welcome to the North Texas suburbs, where you, your neighbors, and the residents of the next city can get their water from the North Texas Urban Water District.
Here are four questions and answers to help you understand how the district provides your water and sets your prices.
What is the North Texas Urban Water District?
The district is a water company that sells purified water to 80 cities and towns from Denton to Kaufman Counties. According to the district, it was officially founded in 1950 because of a decreasing groundwater supply in the region.
The 10 original cities were Farmersville, Forney, Garland, McKinney, Mesquite, Princeton, Plano, Rockwall, Royse City, and Wylie. Richardson came in 1973, Allen in 1998, and Frisco in 2001.
How are water prices determined?
The 13 member cities have lower water rates because they financially bear the debt for the district’s infrastructure projects.
This year the price for a member city is $ 2.99 per 1,000 gallons shipped and $ 3.04 for a customer city. The dozen customer cities include Sachse, Rowlett, Sunnyvale, Murphy, Little Elm and Prosper.
Price adjustments that have been made every year since 2006 are due to maintenance and costs related to projects such as the Wylie Water Treatment Plant and Bois d’Arc Lake, according to the district. The new reservoir in Fannin County is about to open after heavy rains in the spring and is scheduled to begin supplying water in 2022.
Fees include the purchase, storage, transportation, treatment, testing, and delivery of the water to providers who route it to homes and businesses in North Texas.
The cities then set their own water tariffs in stages based on water usage. The less water people use, the lower their prices are.
Why was there a lawsuit about the fees and what happened?
The water prices were at the center of a long-standing dispute between the 13 member cities and the district in connection with the cost-sharing method “Take or pay”, which the member cities had agreed on for the first time in 1953.
Plano, Richardson, Garland and Mesquite argued for almost 20 years that the tariff structure was out of date because – mainly for conservation reasons – they no longer needed nearly as much water as they were contractually obliged to buy.
Last October, the district and cities unanimously agreed on a new wholesale tariff structure that determines the cost share of the individual cities. Over the next seven years, the minimum annual amount each city had to pay will be gradually adjusted to bring the total cost into line with the city’s actual historical consumption.
How much these wholesale cost changes will affect suburban water bills depends on the retail tariffs that each city sets.
Where does the water come from and how is it treated?
The district was responsible for building Lavon Lake near Wylie, the largest water source for North Texas.
Its water also comes from Jim Chapman Lake east of Greenville, Lake Texoma near Denison, Lake Tawakoni south of Greenville, and the East Fork Water Reuse Project, a large man-made wetland that naturally draws water from the Trinity River filters.
This water is treated in one of six systems at the waterworks. The treatment initially uses a process in which large particles such as dirt fall to the bottom of the water. It is then sanitized to destroy any remaining parasites, bacteria or viruses and tested before being sent to water towers and ultimately to your sink.
Every year in spring, the water in the member cities can taste like chlorine for a month, while the district changes the disinfectant during water treatment.
Columnist Sharon Grigsby contributed to this report.
[ad_1]