Inclusion, collaboration, innovative financing, and long-range planning all comprise critical aspects of the One Water approach, according to the speakers at a recent panel discussion conducted as part of the Texas Water Development Board’s Water for Texas 2023 conference, which took place in Austin from January 23–25. 

Held January 24 and titled “Making Every Drop Count: An Integrated Water Management Approach,” the panel addressed the question of what role One Water can play in helping Texas meet its water needs now and in the future. Although focused on Texas, the discussion has broad applicability to other regions as well.

“One Water offers a way for us to grow as a region while protecting and respecting water resources at the same time,” said Jennifer Walker, the director of the Texas Coast and Water Program for the National Wildlife Federation and the moderator of the panel. 

However, water resources are not the only focus, Walker noted. “An important concept of One Water is multiple benefits, meaning that we are not just focused on water supply, but also flood mitigation, parkland development, the environment, and our community, implemented well and thoughtfully. One Water can meet many needs in our community while ensuring that we have water now and in the future.”

Including multiple sectors

To succeed, One Water approaches must engage with and consider the needs of a diverse array of water users, said Sharlene Leurig, the chief executive officer of Texas Water Trade, a nonprofit organization that promotes sustainable water transactions in the state. Such approaches, Leurig said, must address the question of, “How are you solving the problems of multiple water users?”

There is “no way that we can actually do this in a purposeful way that has scale and long-term durability, unless we're solving water reliability and quality problems for other users, whether they're [agriculture], mining, industrial, municipal, or whatever they might be,” she said.

Daniel Nix, the utilities operations manager for the City of Wichita Falls, Texas, agreed, noting that collaboration among different sectors will be needed to overcome the water-related challenges facing Texas. “You've got issues with groundwater sustainability,” Nix said. “You've got a limited number of reservoir sites left that can be built. You couple that with climate change and recurring drought, you're going to have to look at what water resources are available to you and explore their use and how they're utilized across not only the municipal sector but all sectors, including agriculture, power generation, and industry.”

In Texas, as in many states, agriculture dominates water use. For this reason, the agriculture sector must be included as part of One Water efforts, Nix said. “The biggest user of water is agriculture,” he noted. “So asking for an audience with that industry, I think, would go a long way in the One Water concept.”

For example, if agricultural interests conserve water, municipalities and others also can benefit, Nix noted. If farmers and ranchers have more water, “that also means that we have more water as well,” he said. “Understanding how they do things and how we do things, I think that goes a long way. So starting those conversations is very important with the other stakeholders that use water in the State of Texas.”

Given the importance of water to economic growth, collaborative efforts to sustain water supplies will boost development in the Lone Star State, Nix said. “We all know that water obviously is an economic driver, and One Water will be the future of Texas,” he said. 

Collaboration and its discontents

Despite its importance to One Water approaches, collaboration is often a difficult process, Leurig noted. “It’s really, really hard work to actually find the right stakeholders and to sit down and build trust and to look at ways that you can collectively exercise that muscle at collective action and investment in what is a shared resource inherently,” she said.

Denver Water has experienced its share of difficulties in its pursuit of collaborative One Water approaches, particularly when working with other agencies that have different motivations, said Damian Higham, the recycled water program lead for the utility, which provides water for 1.5 million people in the Denver region. “We may have our set of drivers, but those drivers are completely different for a wastewater utility or for a stormwater utility,” Higham said.

“Quantifying and putting a dollar value to benefits to other utilities that may or may not have similar service areas” is “one of the trickiest problems we've had,” Higham said. Such a problem often arises in the case of a project that offers ancillary benefits to different organizations but “doesn't have enough benefits to any individual entity engaged in the project for them to do it alone,” he said. 

In such cases, prospective utility partners need to be able “to quantify and measure” the potential benefits of a project in order to defend participation in the project “to a utility board or your ratepayers,” Higham said. “But how you put a dollar figure to that or quantify it in some ways is the trickiest part. There's a lot of levers to pull.”

Innovative financing needed

Responding to the question of how to pay for One Water approaches, Leurig called for greater use of innovative financing mechanisms. “We as water practitioners have to push the envelope and go beyond existing off-the-shelf financing structures, because it is just not going to be sufficient to meet the need,” Leurig said.

For example, making developers aware of existing funding sources for such practices as using onsite water resources can help to overcome the financial impediments to greater adoption of such measures, which offer a major source of new supply in the future, Leurig said. 

As an example, Leurig pointed to the headquarters building of the credit union Credit Human in San Antonio. Completed in 2021, the 12-story facility employs a host of approaches to reduce energy and water consumption, including large-scale rainwater harvesting. Ultimately, the building uses 97% less potable water than a facility of comparable size, according to Credit Human’s website. By saving on energy and water costs, the company expects to achieve a positive return on its investment within 13 years.

Unfortunately, few developers engage in this type of farsighted project because “it costs more money upfront,” Leurig said, even though the investment can be expected to pay itself off over the lifetime of a building.  

In Texas, Leurig said, “one way that we have to solve this problem that's outside the box” is the Texas Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) Authority, a nonprofit organization that administers programs whereby local governments and the private sector join forces to provide long-term, affordable financing for permanent improvements to decrease water or energy consumption or demand in commercial, industrial, or multifamily residential properties. (In 2021, the National Wildlife Federation’s Texas Coast and Water Program and Texas Water Trade released a report detailing how PACE financing may be used to spur greater water reuse throughout the state.)

For their part, utilities have a role to play in helping the private sector understand their best options for conserving and reusing water, particularly approaches that at times might be “wild ideas,” Higham said. “Developers need to know what's available and what makes sense and where,” he said. “You can have some justification for crossing some things off the list and some justification for encouraging them to head in a particular way, and have the data to back some of that up.”

For the practice of wastewater reuse in particular, “we have got to find a way of using all the forms of funding that the state already has to allow for projects to be jointly financed,” Leurig said. The cost of the upgraded treatment for a reuse project should not simply “be put on the backs of the wastewater treatment provider,” she said. “If we don't do that, we will never have enough water to reuse in the State of Texas, and we won't meet the need.”

Long-range planning helps

Panel participants also emphasized the importance of long-range planning as part of One Water efforts. For example, Wichita Falls benefited greatly from its advanced legwork when a severe drought struck the city a decade ago.

As part of planning efforts begun in the 1990s, Wichita Falls had examined the possibility of implementing either direct or indirect potable reuse to capture part of the 10 mgd of wastewater effluent being discharged to the environment from the city’s wastewater treatment plant, Nix said. When the drought hit, the city approached the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality about conducting direct potable reuse (DPR). 

“From the day that we approached them about DPR and turning it on was 27 months,” Nix said, despite the fact that Texas had regulations for permitting DPR at the time. (This past November, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality released a staff guidance manual detailing how the state regulates DPR and what public water systems must do to receive approval for a DPR project.) Upon the drought’s end in 2015, Wichita Falls transitioned to an indirect potable reuse system because “we had already started the planning process” for it, Nix said.

Meanwhile, the City of Austin adopted a 100-year integrated water resource plan in 2018. To be updated every 5 years, Austin’s Water Forward plan aims to ensure adequate supplies of water “for a city that will be four times the size” of its current population nearly a century from now, said Leurig, who chaired the task force that developed the plan.