Providing Kyle with water: “It costs a lot of money to do it”

 The Kyle City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to authorize increasing its debt by $34.5 million to pay the costs of supplying residents with water, a debt that will be repaid by a 10 percent increase in water rates.

The $34.5 million is the third and final installment in Kyle’s $67.725 million share of the costs for the Alliance Regional Water Authority to ship groundwater from Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer to the city and is about $7 million more than was originally anticipated when ARWA was created in 2007.

The project involves digging the wells into the aquifer, the construction of an approximately 85-mile pipeline to ship the water as well as acquiring the easements from more than 300 landowners along the designated route of the pipeline, the construction of a water treatment plant capable of handling 20 million gallons of water a day, a booster pump station and two elevated storage tanks, one with a capacity of 1.5 million gallons and the other with a one-million-gallon capacity. If all goes according to plan, the city should begin receiving water from the aquifer in the summer of 2023.

Council member Dex Ellison described the project as “a much-needed approach to our long-term water resources and infrastructure, but, unfortunately, it costs a lot of money to do it.”

The water rate increase, Finance Director Perwez Moheet told the council, is the first passed on to residents since 2014.

ARWA Executive Director Graham Moore told the council “material and labor costs have been very volatile over the last couple of months” which has resulted in higher than anticipated project costs. However, he added, these additional costs have been offset somewhat by lower-than-anticipated interest rates on the bonds that will be issued to finance the project.

The ARWA project will also supply water from the aquifer to San Marcos, Buda and the Canyon Regional Water Authority (which represents County Line Special Utility District, Crystal Clear Special Utility District, Green Valley Special Utility District and Martindale Water Supply Corporation).