Amarillo’s tap water tastes bad; It might be turning people away from civic life altogether

AMARILLO, Texas (KAMR/KCIT) – For nearly every year that it has published an annual quality report, the City of Amarillo has confirmed that its tap water is safe according to national and state standards.

However, despite municipal tap water in Amarillo being generally safe and – like drinking water utilities across the United States – provided at a much lower unit cost than commercially bottled water or water kiosks, daily conversations and audience surveys reveal that many around Amarillo do not drink their faucet water. Similar trends can be found in anecdotes around the greater Texas Panhandle region as well, in urban and rural communities alike.

Amarilloans aren’t alone in their tap water hesitation: as detailed by professors Manuel Teodoro, Samantha Zuhlke and David Switzer in their 2022 report, “The Profits of Distrust,” communities throughout the US as a whole have increasingly chosen bottled and kiosk water instead of relying on cheaper, quality-regulated, environmentally friendlier tap water.

That switch gives money to corporations instead of local services and adds to the costs of living for communities and groups that are often struggling economically.

Even further, those people often turn off their tap as well as tap out of civic engagement entirely.

While Amarillo isn’t alone in its apparent distaste for tap water, it is unique in how it offers a look at many of the most common reasons people say they switched from tap water and the groups that tend to switch the most. However, Teodoro suggests that Amarillo and communities like it can still take steps to bring people back into the fold of using public services and engaging with their local leaders.

How? Both the sources and solutions for tap water and civic engagement issues in the Yellow City might be found in tap water taste, water system improvements, as well as community outreach and participation.

Tap water distaste and disengagement

Political science and public administration researchers Daniel Carpenter and George Krause have written multiple papers on how the reputations of public agencies and officials are formed and their impact on daily life and civic engagement – which includes using basic services like water.

Carpenter and Krause described that agencies and their leaders have four basic categories of reputation with the people they serve:

• Performative reputation – Whether or not the public believes a government can effectively and efficiently execute its policies;
• Technical reputation – Whether the public believes government agencies have the skill and capacity to succeed;
• Moral reputation – How the public views the government regarding its compassion, flexibility and honesty; and
• Procedural reputation – Whether the government appears fair and consistent in following accepted rules and norms.

These reputations can vary in that a government and its agencies could have a mixed set, such as people perceiving it as compassionate and honest but not skilled and resourced enough to work efficiently – whether or not those things are true. A government or agency might perform its function well but still be perceived as unreliable, for instance, if people are not aware of those functions or if their outcomes are poor.

In the context of Amarillo, this means that some people may trust the local government less and refrain from drinking tap water because of things like taste, how often water or sewer main breaks happen near their homes, and what kind of historical relationship their communities may have with government generally.

Tap water taste

As explained in previous reports, tap water in Amarillo is supplied mostly by the Ogallala Aquifer System with some supplemental surface water from Lake Meredith, and its taste can be influenced in countless ways.

From one angle, increasingly briney groundwater from the draining aquifer has its taste impacted by its salt and soil content as well as being sent through heavily calcified aqueduct piping. Further, both ground and surface water sources in the Amarillo area are susceptible to contamination from fertilizers, pesticides and other agricultural chemicals alongside waste from feedlots, septic systems, oil fields and abandoned wells.

Those factors and potential contaminants, among others, necessitate that the tap water is heavily treated to be safe for human use, and all of them impact the taste.

Community members in Amarillo have described the straight-from-the-faucet tap water as commonly bleach-tasting or metallic with the taste or smell of chlorine, or otherwise salty or leaving a kind of film or slimy sensation over the tongue. Further, the hardness of Amarillo’s tap water not only impacts its taste and odor but also the effect it has on materials ranging from dishware to fabric.

Using Carpenter and Krause’s terms, the taste of tap water has an impact on the performative and technical reputations of water providers. When a person has direct contact with their local government by experiencing issues like foul-tasting water, low water pressure, water damage to appliances and pipes, and infrastructure issues, they tend to not only dislike the water but also not trust that it’s safe. Even though the water might be totally safe, the bad experience reduces the person’s trust as a citizen in their tap water and the government providing it.

According to Teodoro in an analysis of 2015 NEXUS survey data deployed by Texas A&M University, people who reported their water tasted bad and/or made them feel sick tended to have a 12.8% lower trust in local government than average.

Further, survey data revealed water taste’s effect on people’s trust in local government was even comparable to – or stronger than – the effect of political partisanship. While Republicans generally tended to trust their local government significantly less than Democrats, survey respondents who said their water tasted bad had nearly the same low level of trust in government no matter their political party.

Even further, data showed that the taste of tap water often had more of an impact on people’s trust in their local government than if they thought the water was fully safe. Data from the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study Survey suggested that even if people weren’t sure their water was healthy, they were still more likely to trust their local government if they thought the taste was good.

“This result suggests that taste is perhaps the most important factor when it comes to evaluations of government on the basis of water services,” said Teodoro, even before considering demographic or politically partisan factors.

Infrastructure

Water taste and water infrastructure are both connected to what Teodoro poses as the most important factor in deciding the reputations of basic services and their government systems: Outcomes.

If tap water tastes bad, people have been shown to generally distrust its safety and source. Similarly, when people experience or hear about and witness water main breaks, wastewater spills and other water service interruptions or mishaps due to infrastructure, they are less likely to believe their water service is reliable and their water is safe. If people do not believe their government is fixing problems they have encountered or working to maintain safe and stable systems, they are unlikely to trust their government or the products and services it delivers.

“Ordinary but seldom scrutinized, a community’s water infrastructure performance evidently shapes trust in institutions of government,” noted Teodoro.

As noted in previous reports on MyHighPlains.com, as recently as July 2024 residents of Amarillo voiced complaints regarding aged and unreliable water and sewer infrastructure. In some areas, such as the historically Black North Heights neighborhood, community members reported city blocks being filled with the smell of hydrogen sulfide – a rotten smell that builds up and can waft out of sewers, which city officials cited as a consequence of older water and sewer lines.

While Amarillo has consistently expanded during its history, the pipes in North Heights and other neighborhoods have not been updated since they were first placed in the 1920s – similar to many other cities in the US. Lead, copper and clay pipes that have in some cases aged for more than a century have corroded, and risk not only impacting water quality but also the reliability of the water system as a whole.

Replacing those pipes will be a long and costly process, as noted by Amarillo officials, but it is one to which the city said it is committed. Officials also cited at least one project that will expand the city’s sewer system by about 13 miles in north Amarillo, where North Heights is located. During a budget workshop at the end of July, officials also detailed how the largest fraction of the city’s debt is focused on water and sewage, and noted multiple capital improvement projects for those sectors set for the next few years.

However, the sewer expansion is not expected to be completed until at least 2025. In the meantime, North Heights residents like Warren Coble have remained concerned about help not coming quickly enough and the negative health effects that could impact the community in the meantime. At the same time, Coble and others expressed bitterness about water infrastructure in their neighborhoods appearing to take a backseat to other city projects, such as updating its minor league baseball stadium.

Historic neglect for North Heights, according to residents, has not only included infrastructure issues with the sewer but water pressure and main lines as well.

“We talked first about the water pressure and how the pressure is not good,” said Melodie Graves, Community Activist and a leader of the North Heights Advisory Association, after a community meeting, “People also talked about people’s houses burning down and then watching people houses burn down because we did not have sufficient fire hydrants. But the thing is, that the since we don’t have the pressure, we still even if we get them updated, they’re still not effective in helping to prevent the fires.”

Not only are community members in North Heights and similar neighborhoods contending with aesthetic issues like tap water taste, but water and sewer issues that impact community safety on a far more immediate basis than can comfortably compare to long-term improvement plans. While ongoing infrastructure evaluations and 10-year plans have their value, Graves and others contended that the community needs urgent and obvious action.

“We’ve waited long enough,” said former North Heights resident Tamara Smith. “We need to get these projects going.”

Community leaders and activists in North Heights have continued to discuss with city officials and encourage their neighbors to make their voices heard to encourage change. However, as pointed out by Teodoro, in areas where infrastructure issues have degraded public trust, people are less likely to engage with the civic process at all.

They don’t see a point. If a government isn’t trusted to have the skill or commitment to fixing issues with outcomes as visible as water service, why should community members spend time and energy giving their input?

The lack of trust in the system creates a cycle in which services and infrastructure, civic engagement, and government investment and service quality all worsen and worsen one another.

The cycle is worse, and harder to escape, in communities where distrust and disenfranchisement have been the norm.

Historic distrust and disenfranchisement

Like with the historically-Black North Heights neighborhood or the historically-Hispanic El Barrio neighborhood in Amarillo, many communities have had civic disengagement built in by design.

As explained by the “Mapping Inequality” project by the University of Richmond, redlining as a practice occurred through much of the 20th century in which mortgages were categorically denied to individuals and entire neighborhoods. The federal government graded the “residential security” of thousands of neighborhoods for banks, savings and loans, and other mortgage-making lenders.

Neighborhoods were literally colored red on the federal maps that were deemed “hazardous,” most often because the people who lived in those areas were Black, immigrants or Jewish people. These federal grades led to those neighborhoods and the people in them losing access to mortgages, impacting the health and economic development of community members in those areas and demographics in ways that have lingered into the 2020s.

In Amarillo, federal maps marked what would become the modern North Heights and El Barrio neighborhoods as “hazardous” or otherwise undesirable. People were denied chances to own homes and build wealth, and their neighborhoods were considered similarly too “hazardous” for consistent investment and attention from government agencies.

The federal, state and local governments decided nearly 100 years ago that large swaths of Amarillo and its people were unworthy of having access to housing and resources, and communicated as much with widely-published maps, legislation, business practices and a denial of community investment.

In 2024, that means that large swaths of Amarillo still contend with a lack of housing and resources, unstable infrastructure, and the experience of being ignored or directly antagonized by government agencies on every level. While the era of redlining may have ended on paper, the people of Amarillo still remember that message, engraved in memory and cracked pavement, and it isn’t one that inspires trust or engagement with their local government.

North Heights and El Barrio both have vibrant, growing communities in 2024 with groups of well-known and effective citizen leaders and local committees who continue to advocate for their neighbors. However, as noted by Teodoro, expecting poor and disenfranchised communities to be responsible for rebuilding government legitimacy puts a burden for time, energy and money on people who are already suffering from government failure.

“Expecting mass mobilization of dissatisfied and alienated citizens to emerge demanding high-quality, universal basic services is therefore neither realistic nor ethically defensible,” said Teodoro, “Breaking the cycle of distrust requires leadership from within government… Rather than sidestepping basic service challenges because they are difficult, costly, or unglamorous, public-sector leaders must embrace those challenges and champion solutions to them.”

Part of that involves funding infrastructure projects like Amarillo’s incoming sewer expansion, but Teodoro – and Amarillo’s community members – noted that building trust in city water and city government will take more.

Regaining a taste for tap water and civic life

Teodoro poses that a lack of trust in local tap water service can be seen as a symptom of a broader erosion of trust in governance. However, local tap water service also holds the potential to establish, or re-establish, that trust.

To do that, Teodoro suggests that “Governments must attack head-on the water sector’s crumbling infrastructure, its uneven public communication, and its service failures that disproportionately fall upon low-income, racial and ethnic minority communities.”

On the level of local government and community engagement in Amarillo, Teodoro offered that adjustments to tap water taste and awareness could go a long way.

Water taste

According to its published reports, Amarillo’s tap water quality consistently meets the primary federal and state drinking water standards for safety. However, those standards only focus on contaminants that are associated with risks to human health.

While the Safe Drinking Water Act describes two standards for drinking water, only the list of primary standards is enforced. The secondary standards, which focus on drinking water aesthetics like taste, odor and color, are not obligatory.

However, as pointed out by Teodoro as well as researchers like Gregory Pierce in “Science of the Total Environment,” tap water that meets SDWA health requirements but looks, smells or tastes bad erodes public trust in that water even if it is safe to drink. Bodies of water research support the idea that the taste of tap water is one of the most important factors people consider when deciding whether or not to consider it safe and use it.

“We urge the water sector to embrace secondary standards and to take the aesthetic aspects of water seriously so that tap water is not merely safe, but truly excellent,” said Teodoro, “Compliance with primary standards is crucial, of course, but primary standards should be seen as water quality guardrails, not targets… At a minimum, achievement of secondary standards should be considered a professional goal for water utility managers.”

That may be easier said than done, given how varied the factors are that can influence the taste of water, but there are steps that cities like Amarillo could take to meet those secondary standards or otherwise be communicative with citizens about why the water tastes the way it does and what they might do at home to help.

Amarillo could adjust its water treatment process to help its water hardness or aim to meet secondary standards like those set for Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), which Amarillo reported exceeding by more than 220 mg/L in 2023 compared to the suggested limit.

Further, some taste issues might be solved with infrastructure replacement and upkeep that might stop or prevent the taste impacts that can come from corroded pipes.

Otherwise, Amarillo could also create an official public guide for water quality and taste. The City of Portland, Oreg., published multiple public guides for troubleshooting and reporting water quality issues, including explanations for and possible causes of tap water tastes and possible solutions/official reporting avenues. The Portland guides range from troubleshooting whether or not a water taste issue might be due to in-home pipe issues to explaining how circumstances like seasons, water main flushing, and original water sources can cause different aesthetics; and, even further, steps residents can take to adjust the taste.

In taking certain steps to address water taste or offer explanations and solutions to residents, overall community member experiences with their tap water – even if there are still parts of the water that can’t be changed for one reason or another – might still be improved.

Infrastructure

Removing and replacing lead water service lines, repairing and expanding sewer systems and water treatment facilities, and maintaining that infrastructure will be a long-term and expensive process – as said by Amarillo area officials, researchers like Teodoro, the American Water Works Association and others.

However, officials and citizens alike have also recognized that infrastructure improvements are necessary not only for tap water quality but also for the future sustainability and safety of communities. This need extends to both investing in major projects as well as routine maintenance, replacements and upgrades.

Citizens like those in Amarillo’s North Heights, researchers and water sector officials and experts have continued to call for Amarillo and other communities across the US to prioritize infrastructure adjustments and reliability. Amarillo could pursue funding those projects through avenues like funding and grants obtained from the federal and state governments, bonds, and raising water service rates, among others.

“A perennial fear, approaching conventional wisdom in the American water sector, is that citizens prefer low service rates above all, and that significant rate increases, no matter how well justified, will invite the wrath of angry voters,” wrote Teodoro, “Elected officials and local government utility managers are thus reluctant to make needed investments for fear of sparking a backlash.”

However, Teodoro went on to note that the body of evidence related to water service and civics research suggested that backlash from citizens for increased water rates has generally been minimal or nonexistent, as long as citizens can directly recognize a link between rate increases and service improvements. As mentioned previously, once again – demonstrated daily outcomes for citizen experiences are what makes the difference.

Further, Teodoro suggests that local governments invest in visible, functioning water infrastructure that can both serve public needs and familiarize citizens with the infrastructure and service, such as aesthetically pleasing public drinking fountains like the “Benson Bubblers” in Portland or well-designed and maintained splash pads. This kind of effort can help bring awareness about water infrastructure to daily life in a positive way, when otherwise the most familiar experience with it may be witnessing a work crew disrupt a street to repair a main.

Openness and quality reports

For a community member to recognize, appreciate and participate fully with tap water service and any number of other aspects of civic life, they need to be aware of it.

Most people may not have the time to spend money and multiple workdays on reading and cross-referencing long-form research projects on tap water and local governance, digging through obscure government web pages of submitted water testing results and learning to read them, touring wastewater treatment facilities, posing questions to water providers, and comparing government websites and resources to get an understanding of their local water system and tap water taste. Many people also may not have the time or prerequisite awareness to find their local water system’s basic information or water quality reports at all.

The City of Amarillo hosts a basic information page and FAQ on its website for its water utility services that offers contact information and short answers to common questions. As noted previously, the city also – save for a few instances – consistently posts Water Quality/Consumer Confidence Reports that can be found on that webpage or a sub-page for its Environmental Laboratory, alongside a few of its past chemical analysis reports.

However, there remain some explanatory gaps and notices in these reports and webpages, including making a note about recent title formatting changes to the Water Quality reports, fully explaining the ground-surface water ratio of the tap water supply mentioned in the reports, or expanding on the chemical analysis reports to detail what levels for which chemicals might be considered high and/or what they might impact. The more detailed notes about safety on the most recent Water Quality report are also in small font below individual contaminant level tables which may be easy to miss.

Such items might be considered minor, but they nevertheless mean that a citizen looking at those reports might miss out on fully understanding their tap water and its safety without pre-standing knowledge, already knowing what to look for and/or hours of outside research.

Even then, like with many other municipal water utilities, Amarillo’s Water Quality reports themselves do not provide customers with information about other parts of the utility performance like capital investments, system integrity, utility financial stability, reliability, security and equity.

Teodoro and others like researchers Branden Johnson and Siddhartha Roy in previous works, note that this need for pre-standing knowledge and research requirements highlights cases of asymmetrical information with Amarillo’s tap water and the tap water in other cities. The researchers suggested that the gaps in information and formatting issues in the Water Quality reports and the general lack of communication and transparency about them can make them less effective when it comes to improving trust in tap water.

Instead of and/or in addition to traditional Water Quality reports, as such, Teodoro suggests that water utilities like Amarillo develop and widely distribute an annual report card from an independent organization that can help communicate clearly and simply about its performance.

“A simple, comprehensive report card, published in multiple languages, would give a utility’s leaders a powerful, intuitive way to communicate performance and progress to their citizen-consumers,” said Teodoro, “Report cards should highlight the quality of a utility’s service on key dimensions including water quality, reliability, resilience, affordability, equity and security.”

These report cards, noted Teodoro, could also both be used by leaders to demonstrate the value of rate increases and otherwise highlight improvements and strong performance, and citizens and others could use them to demand accountability from utilities that persistently perform poorly or backslide. Teodoro used formats such as the Hospital Compare ratings system as examples of how the report cards may look and function.

Albeit, neither the Water Quality reports nor any potential report card means much if community members do not see them or actively communicate with and about their water utilities.

Community outreach and equity

Whether a community like Amarillo is developing new ways to report about its water or just making its current system and resources known to its community members, it must communicate – including and especially with the people who already distrust it.

Amarillo uses common communication avenues like most other water utilities, including public meetings, advisory boards, telephone lines and websites; but Teodoro and others, like researcher Sally Nuamah, suggest that those useful avenues might still not build trust.

“These traditional means of public engagement only engage citizen-consumers who already have sufficient moral trust in government to believe that their voices will shape decisions and outcomes,” said Teodoro, citing Nuamah, “These politically marginalized populations who are most likely to drink commercial water instead of tap water are unlikely to communicate with utilities that they distrust.”

The people who read and use Amarillo’s Water Quality reports are people who actively own homes and businesses and either get those reports automatically or know where to look, and know how to understand and apply the information, and often already trust the water utility or otherwise are civically engaged. People who don’t get those reports automatically because they own buildings connected to the utility, or don’t know where to look for them, or don’t have pre-standing knowledge, or don’t already trust the utility get less use out of those reports. The reports only work for people who get and trust them.

To help reach those already-disengaged community members and build trust, Teodoro suggests cities like Amarillo invest in actively establishing relationships with and gathering information from all communities that they serve, such as through things like the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District’s “Good Neighbor Ambassador” program. That ambassador program, as an example, is made of people recruited from neighborhoods the district serves to act as community liaisons between the utility, the community and business organizations.

Elsewhere, Teodoro noted that some utilities like the Seattle Public Utilities ran pilot demonstrations in a diverse spread of neighborhoods in 2013 and used scientific surveys to evaluate residents’ attitudes toward changes to their performance policies.

The most important part of these strategies, said Teodoro, is that both the ambassador program and the surveys opened channels of communication at the utility’s expense; they were aimed at giving voice to community members who would otherwise be unheard in water system management and policymaking.

All of these measures and others also contribute to building overall tap water equity, meaning tap water service is excellent everywhere and utility and regulatory organizations are open to everyone.

Teodoro and the body of other work related to tap water and civic engagement suggest changes in how tap water and other basic services are organized, funded and provided at national, state and local levels that require various degrees of legislation and broad policy adjustments. There is no one level of government that can reasonably fix everything – it will require time and massive amounts of inter-governmental and community collaboration.

However, as with most issues that impact day-to-day life, incremental changes are both possible and effective. The people of Amarillo contend with a casual, often literal, distaste for tap water and a long history of disenfranchisement, but its community leaders can continue to take steps to change that dynamic, both through policy and reporting changes and simple investments in bringing its community members into the conversation.

For the latest Amarillo news and regional updates, check with MyHighPlains.com and tune in to KAMR Local 4 News at 5:00, 6:00, and 10:00 p.m. and Fox 14 News at 9:00 p.m. CST.