CORPUS CHRISTI (Kiii News) -
The City of Corpus Christi is set to spend $1 million this year in an effort to beef up our water supply.
The money will be used to buy up land which sits between Bay City and Lake Texana. That would be for the proposed Garwood Pipeline, which would run from the Colorado River over to the City's Mary Rhodes pump station at Lake Texana.
The Mary Rhodes Pipeline supplies over 40-percent of our drinking water.
So why all of this sudden activity?
There has been at least one oil service company who has asked the City to buy water for fracking. That water would come from our reservoir system, which includes Choke Canyon and Lake Corpus Christi. City Council gave the go ahead for a plan earlier this week to ask the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to allow it to be able to sell some of that lake water in the future for mining purposes.
The idea is to lease the lake water to help build that Garwood Pipeline, which would then supply over 60-percent of our water.
The City said there are also several other options still on the table.
"We're looking at alternatives," Assistant City Manager Oscar Martinez said. "It could be those rights should be first perfected by building a pipeline, or there's other options. We could lease those water rights for a period of time and make some money off that, and reinvest that back into future water supplies. So we continue to look into all avenues."
Officials said that any deal to sell lake water will be decided by City Council, and drought
conditions are going to play a big role in that decision.
As far as Garwood, the design and land acquisition should be complete by 2014. Construction could begin by 2018.
