“The state’s water infrastructure system is not prepared to handle the efficiency and conservation goals that we need to have in our rural communities,” said Sarah Rountree Schlessinger, the chief executive officer of the Texas Water Foundation, a nonprofit advancing Texas’ water sustainability. “The combination of decreasing water supply, aging infrastructure, and population shifts changes the economics of whether or not a community is secure, and I think that rural Texans are going to have higher water risk.”
Without meaningful intervention, The Texas Water Development Board, a state agency that manages water planning, projects that municipal water users in every region of the state will face water shortages 15 times larger by 2070, approximately 3.1 million acre-feet, compared to 2020. By 2070, these water shortages are estimated to create $153 billion in economic damages with significant irrigation needs remaining unmet due to depleted aquifers.
In rural Hill Country, people are already seeing these shortages in their local streams and springs.
“Jacob’s Well, Cypress Creek, and other Hill Country springs that once flowed year round have stopped flowing multiple times in recent years,” said David Baker, executive director of the Watershed Association, an organization working to preserve the Wimberley Valley. “Over the past decade, water availability in the Hill Country has become increasingly limited due to rapid population growth, extended drought, and record groundwater pumping.”
In Kinney County, a rural county in southwestern Texas, Gage Brown, a Kinney County resident and member of the Las Moras Springs Conservation Association, said the local spring has started drying up over the summer.
“In 2022, the Las Moras spring went dry for the first time in my lifetime or my mom’s lifetime. It’s been going dry every single summer since then and that’s never happened before,” Brown said. “That same year, in 2022, the pumping doubled. Now, like clockwork, every April the spring goes dry within a week and it comes back every September.”
Some water advocates said that addressing infrastructure needs will be essential to reducing the long-term risk to the state’s rural water supply.
“The current state infrastructure is aging. Our water transport and treatment infrastructure is decades old and insufficient in its capacity,” said Cody Ackermann, manager of the Texas Hill Country Conservation Network. “I think the issue is most pronounced in rural communities because they don’t have the user base or the tax base to cover the costly improvements and updates that are needed.”
Texas loses an estimated 186 billion gallons of water annually from leaks in pipes alone. Yet, competition for state funding to update infrastructure is fierce.
In 2025, 355 projects sought funding from the Texas Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, for a combined total of $4.5 billion in requested investments. But only 31 projects were invited to apply for $500 million in investments, leaving a shortfall of roughly $4 billion and more than 300 communities without assistance.
“Because there is competition for limited funding, many communities we work with may not get the money that they apply for,” said Marisa Bruno, the water program manager with the Hill Country Alliance. “We know many systems need to invest in shoring up their water supplies, or making system repairs, but the pot is currently too small to meet the demand from all the systems that apply.”
But the constitutional amendment, presented to voters as Proposition 4, will help fill that pot.
“This investment will help bridge that gap and allow rural communities to make infrastructure improvements without having to pass those costs on to the water utility customers,” Ackermann said.
To alleviate the financial burden on smaller rural water systems, the state will offer low-interest and forgivable loans.
“For small, rural water systems considered ‘disadvantaged,’ the Texas Water Development Board will award a mix of low-interest loans, and forgivable loans, which are more akin to grants,” Bruno said.
In these communities, over two-thirds of the projects’ cost can be forgivable, which can make these improvements possible when limited funds are available.
As federal funding becomes less certain, state investment becomes more essential.
“With federal funding cuts, the need for water infrastructure funding may increase because traditionally we get some money from the federal government to help fund water infrastructure,” Bruno said. “Proposition 4 creates a dedicated funding stream for water infrastructure that will help fill some of those gaps.”
As water availability dwindles across the state, some rural residents worried that this infrastructure initiative could worsen their water situation if it supported groundwater pipelines that drew water from rural areas to transport to cities. But Bruno said that this won’t happen.
“The legislation that created Prop 4 specifically says that the Texas Water Fund cannot be used for transport of fresh groundwater, which is so important,” Bruno said.
Instead, it could be used for projects like aquifer storage and recovery, systems that allow cities such as Kerrville to store treated river water underground during times of surplus and draw on it during droughts, reducing dependence on limited groundwater and river supplies.
(Ilana Newman / Daily Yonder)
The aquifer storage and recovery system allowed Kerrville to control which drought stages it entered and to reduce the severity of water-use restrictions placed on the local community.
Creating new funding for infrastructure and conservation will promote projects like these and contribute to the long-term sustainability of the state’s water resources across rural and urban areas.
“These investments will help farmers, ranchers, and rural water suppliers stretch limited supplies, lower costs, and keep water local,” Baker said. “By aligning land conservation, water management, and infrastructure planning, rural Texas can safeguard both its springs and its livelihoods for the long term.”
This story first appeared in the Daily Yonder. Read the original here.
