“The top three conservation issues in Texas are water, water and water,” proclaimed former Texas Parks and Wildlife executive director Robert Cook in the early 2000s.
Ensuing years of searing droughts , parched reservoirs and rampant wildfires proved Cook’s prediction prescient. The state’s ballooning population and intensifying weather patterns promise to only worsen the strain.
“In recent years, increasing population and economic development in north central Texas have led to growing demands for water supplies,” reads the opening section of Fort Worth’s latest water conservation plan, unveiled in April . “Local and less expensive sources of water supply are already developed and additional supplies to meet future demands will be expensive and difficult to secure.”
The plan detailed the policies and pledges the city had undertaken to expand its water sources and preserve its existing ones. Fort Worth officials and some state environmental organizations celebrate Cowtown’s steady progress on water conservation. Other experts say Fort Worth residents still use too much, faulting the city government, in part, for doing too little to change their habits.
Gulping gallons
Fort Worth lapped up just under 155 gallons of water per capita each day in 2023. Single-family homes guzzled just over half of all the water the city consumed. City leaders hope to reach the 150 mark by 2029, when updates for its next conservation plan are due.
Cowtown consumed roughly 151 gallons of water per day in 2019; the conservation strategy it drew up that year aspired to slash water use to 140 gallons by 2024.
Most big Texas cities use substantially less. Austin, San Antonio, and Houston in 2022 consumed 134, 121 and 124 gallons per capita. Dallas gulped 180 gallons that year.
“It’s really pretty striking,” Todd Votteler, the principal of Collaborative Water Resolution LLC, a Texas water dispute mediation firm, said of Fort Worth’s comparatively high water usage. “That really surprised me, that it was that high.”
Fort Worth’s clear, if modest, upswing in water use since 2019 — and the comparative frugality of its peers — would seem to signal a regression.
But the data can be difficult to take at face value, city and state officials say.
Officials from the Texas Water Development Board, the state’s water planning agency, described “total gallons per capita per day” as a statistic with “limitations” in a 2012 report outlining its water use measurement methodologies. Different cities have different climates, layouts, and industries, they explained. Total gallons per capita alone, which tallies water use across almost all sectors of city life, risks paving over nuances and leading to dubious comparisons in efficiency.
A small town with lots of agricultural land but a sound water system, for instance, may record higher per capita rates than a larger town with a leaky system or less ample supply but less water-demanding industries. (Skeptics of this explanation counter that water utilities for Texas’ major metropolises feed little to no agricultural land, and the per capita measurements, however broad, still offer a valuable comparative tool.)
Fort Worth’s Water Department, meanwhile, boiled down the recent uptick in consumption to pandemic-era shifts in water habits and improved measurement capacity.
“Improved metering has resulted in reduced ‘apparent loss’ related to metering inaccuracies and ‘under registering’ of water use,” city water conservation manager Micah Reed wrote to the Star-Telegram. “Second, since the pandemic, more people are working from home. If someone lived in Fort Worth but worked in another community, their daytime water use is now registering in Fort Worth.”
Water use see-sawed in some other big Texas cities during that time fame. Austin used 13 gallons per capita more each day in 2022 than they did in 2019; San Antonio’s water use eeked up six gallons over the same period.
Short term reversals shouldn’t overcast longer term progress, Reed added. Fort Worth’s per capita measurements hovered around 200 in the early 2000s, he said. Education campaigns, digitized water use surveillance , and stricter lawn irrigation restrictions have since dragged consumption down into the 150s. Water loss — the share leaked, miscounted or used by unauthorized customers — has also steadily, if stubbornly, fallen.
Water Next Steps?
Existing policies likely won’t be enough to ride the next wave of conservation challenges, experts note.
Developers are churning out subdivisions with water-hungry lawns to accommodate the ceaseless influx of new residents. Supplying the water to keep them green will require finding and connecting new water sources (a costly and lengthy undertaking) — or further regulating the use of existing ones.
“Outdoor watering is a really good place to target to reduce gallons per capita per day water use,” said Jennifer Walker, senior director of the National Wildlife Foundation’s Texas Coast and Water Program. “And it’s not to say, like, you know, Fort Worth, or any city that does this would not continue to have nice lawns and landscapes. It’s just that we’re a lot smarter about how we will irrigate our landscapes.”
Reed, Fort Worth’s conservation manager, says the city regularly monitors residential water meters through its “MyH2O” program for potential irrigation violations and notifies overusers. Should pesky texts from city bureaucrats or the threat of fines not prove effective enough at curbing waste, Fort Worth officials may weigh another, time-tested policy: making water use more expensive.
“Fort Worth’s residential rate has four tiers and is designed to send a pricing signal to customers — the more water you use, the more you will pay for it,” Reed noted. “We examined how our residential rate tiers compared to those in other cities and found most other large cities in Texas send a much stronger pricing signal than Fort Worth.”
Findings and fixing leaky water mains is an ordeal of its own. Cast iron pipes — 20% of the city’s distribution system — accounts for 85% to 90% of main line breaks, according to Reed.
“By prioritizing and accelerating the replacement of cast iron water lines, the Utility will realize a triple benefit of improving reliability, reducing customer outages, and reducing water loss associated with main breaks and leaks,” he said.
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