exTRA by the Trinity River Authority of Texas

Richardson last adjusted its water and wastewater rates in November 2025, but City Manager Don Magner said the standard rate increases will no longer be sufficient to cover rising costs.

It currently costs Richardson about $120.1 million to run its water and wastewater services for the year. That total will likely hit $196.7 million in 2035, due largely to wholesale rate increases from the North Texas Municipal Water District, which the city buys its water from, consultant Dan Jackson said at a June 8 council meeting.

The Athens City Council met Monday night to consider ordinances addressing data centers and battery energy storage systems. The council voted on an ordinance banning data center construction during the meeting. The vote was 3-2 in favor of the ordinance.

It takes air and water to survive; everything else is a quality-of-life issue. This week, Monday through Wednesday, is the third annual Agricultural Water Sustainability Summit (AWSS). It’s an event that brings stakeholders from the Texas Panhandle and across the South Plains to Lubbock to discuss how to create a new vision for water use and water conservation for the future.

Food processing facilities worldwide [are] struggling to decarbonize, but an Argentinian facility demonstrates that even lemon wastewater can become green energy.

Laredo city leaders say they need more money to fix the city’s water pipes, on top of a multimillion-dollar project that started after years of breaks and boil-water notices. The pipe repair budget has already grown to more than $130 million. City Manager Joseph Neeb said more than 30% of Laredo’s water lines are more than 50 years old, which is driving many of the failures.

Nueces County Judge Connie Scott has issued a comprehensive burn ban for all unincorporated areas of the county, effective August 19 through October 19, 2026. The two-month prohibition comes as South Texas faces continued drought conditions and heightened fire risk. County officials say the ban is a proactive measure to protect public safety and property.

Manvel City Council is considering a 14.9% overall increase in water and wastewater rate revenue for fiscal year 2026-27 to help close a projected gap in the utility fund, following a budget update at its Aug. 17 workshop. Under the proposed scenario, the residential combined minimum bill for the first 2,000 gallons would increase by about $9 per month, city documents show.

Harlingen utility customers could see higher water and wastewater bills starting Oct. 1, 2026, as the city commission considers a final vote to fund $109 million in infrastructure projects.

Last Monday, the City of Amarillo entered Stage 1 of its drought contingency plan after reservoir storage levels hit 60% of its capacity. After a week of voluntary conservation efforts, the reservoir has not recovered. 

Elected officials and industry leaders warn that Texas is at the “precipice” of running out of underground space to dispose of the nearly 1 billion gallons of wastewater that oil and gas production generates every day in the Permian Basin.

Weslaco is holding third-party contractors responsible after they hit underground water lines three times in one day while installing fiber optic cables. The city temporarily stopped all work after the rupture happened on Aug. 12. Crews are now calculating water loss and labor costs to charge the companies for the damage. More than 20 city employees worked all day to finish the repairs.

The most immediate concern centered on Water Well No. 26, a high-priority well on McCaleb Road that city officials said could fail at any time. The well is still operating, but there is currently no city-owned backup well serving the area.

For more than a quarter of a century, Texas has diligently updated its state water plan every five years, a process designed to forecast water supply and demand 50 years into the future — and give communities enough warning about potential water shortages to do something about it. That warning matters because water projects can take years — sometimes decades — to plan, finance and build. For Corpus Christi and the rest of the Coastal Bend, it never came.

Across Texas, lakes and reservoirs have seen the benefits of the heavy rains that drenched the state this spring and summer. Outside of San Antonio, beloved Canyon Lake is completely full. In the Coastal Bend, Lake Corpus Christi is nearly full at more than 91%, and Choke Canyon Reservoir has rebounded from a low of 7.4% earlier this year to nearly one-fourth full now. But in the Rio Grande Valley — the fifth-largest metropolitan area in Texas with a population of about 1.45 million across four counties — the water supply looks much different.

Items not meant to be flushed down toilets are piling up at Laredo’s wastewater treatment plant, according to the Laredo Utilities Department. Socks, plastic toys, T-shirts, and pieces of wood were found in a pile that came from toilets flushed around north Laredo. One major contributor to sewage blockages is the use of wipes.

District 3 City Council Member Eric Cantu is pushing Corpus Christi to ease its water restrictions, questioning why the city has not moved from Stage 2 to Stage 1 under its own drought contingency plan. Combined lake levels have sat above 40% for the past couple of weeks, which meets the threshold for a Stage 1 declaration.