MIDLAND, Texas — Clean and quality water is a basic need no matter where you live, and the City of Midland is working on a 100-year water strategy to ensure the Tall City always has a healthy supply of safe water.
"The entire state of Texas, is concerned about water, and so we, as Midlanders have to be making decisions not just for today and the Midlanders that we're serving today, but for future generations of Midlanders," said Midland Mayor Lori Blong.
On Tuesday, May 28, Midland City Council had discussions about the first 75 years of their 100-year plan.
"We're looking at our surface solutions like the lakes that surround us where we get some of our water and then some of our subsurface solutions where we we have well fields where we're producing water," Mayor Blong said. "Those things together produce the water, the municipal water that we're using right now."
However, none of that current water comes from within the city so the plan is to look for more water sources and improve the ones Midland has.
"As we're drawing down on the water table in some of our subsurface water sources, the quality of that water is depleted," Mayor Blong said. "So we're going to look at different opportunities for treatment of that water to be able to make it safe for municipal use and then also for the Fort Stockton Holdings water that we contracted with a couple of years ago, we don't have a plan right now in place for getting that water from Fort Stockton to Midland."
The comprehensive water plan also aligns with the city's capital funding plan for water and wastewater.
"Right now for water and for wastewater for the city of Midland, our rates are lower than the majority of other communities our size," Mayor Blong said. "With the challenges that we face in finding water and also the challenges that we face in water treatment for the future, we know that we need to be comparable to other similar sized cities, but we don't want to be the lowest in our rates."
We can expect to see an incremental increase in rates starting summer of 2024. They will be aiding the improvement of current infrastructure and advanced water treatments for existing well fields.