Reporting on Texas water -- drought and supply, reservoirs and groundwater, utility infrastructure, conservation rules, and the growing competition for a finite resource.
Texas water utilities that never told their customers the pipe running into the house might be made of lead will start collecting violations by the end of October, the state’s environmental agency said Oct. 13 — and it does not know, or did not say, how many households were left in the dark.
Drought covers far less of Texas than it did a week earlier, but the water sitting in the state's reservoirs has still not caught up.
The Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC) said Commissioner Wayne Christian on Thursday urged Texas lawmakers and regulators to fast-track a clear, efficient regulatory pathway for the industrial reuse of treated produced water, according to an Oct. 15 news release.
Cities and developers seeking permission to pipe treated sewage into a Texas creek may now hire their own consultants to run the computer model that decides how clean that water has to be, under a change the state’s environmental agency put into effect Oct. 13 — with no rule, no comment period and no written policy it has published.
The three-member board that finances most Texas water construction meets Oct. 14 for a work session at which, by the agenda's own terms, it will take no final action on anything.
The state council that pays Texas farmers and ranchers to keep their land out of subdivisions meets Oct. 13 to rewrite how it scores grant applications, and written comments on that vote have to reach Texas Parks and Wildlife by 9 a.m. the morning of the meeting.
Neighbors of a biogas plant that would spray treated waste across 4,553 acres of Ellis County farmland won the right Oct. 7 to fight the permit in front of an independent judge.
Texas environmental regulators will decide Oct. 7 whether people living near a planned biogas plant in Ellis County get a formal hearing before the state lets it spray treated waste across 4,553 acres of farmland.
The three members of the Texas Water Development Board meet Oct. 1 to decide whether to raise Kerr County's flood-warning grant to $6.85 million — more than five times what the county holds now, and about 14 percent of the $50 million the Legislature set aside for 30 counties.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved the final discharge permit for the Harbor Island desalination plant on Sept. 23, two days before a Corpus Christi lawmaker told a Texas Tribune Festival audience that seawater desalination is a key issue for the next legislative session.
The Texas House Committee on Natural Resources will gavel in at 10 a.m. Mountain time Oct. 6 at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research Center in El Paso to hear invited and public testimony on the Rio Grande Compact and oversight of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, followed by invited-only testimony on new water supply strategies, according to the official hearing notice.
The board that oversees Texas's 216 local soil and water conservation districts opens its members' annual convention at 7 a.m. Sept. 28 with a vote on whether certain landowners may collect state water-quality money a second time.
Farms, factories and city water systems that pump from the Edwards Aquifer must cut their withdrawals by 35 percent after the aquifer's key monitoring well dropped below 640 feet, six weeks after the region had climbed out of the same drought stage.
The three members of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality will decide Sept. 23 whether people who objected to a seawater desalination plant at Port Aransas get a trial-like hearing, or whether the permit moves toward approval without one.