Recent rains have raised lake levels enough that the Sulphur Springs city manager is investigating the feasibility of selling water to suppliers in the Metroplex suffering from the 2011 drought.
“It is still serious, but not as serious as it is for the Metroplex,” City Manager Marc Maxwell said Tuesday morning of local water supplies. “Sulphur Springs is in a great position now. Lake Sulphur Springs is now about four inches over the spillway, so our backup water supply is full.”
The level at Cooper Lake, the town’s main water supply, is also up considerably, now only about seven feet low, up from as much as 14 feet low just a few weeks ago.
Sulphur Springs’ water supplies have improved so much Maxwell said he’s beginning to do some preliminary work on selling raw water from Cooper Lake to other municipalities that draw water from the reservoir.
Maxwell emphasized he is not contemplating the sale of water rights, just a one-time sale of a quantity of water.
“We have the right to 18,136 acre-feet [from Cooper Lake] every year,” Maxwell explained. “Even in the worst drought condition that we’ve seen, both in this drought and the previous drought, we’ve never gotten below 9,000 acre-feet still left in our account.”
An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an acre one foot deep in water, or 325,851 gallons of water. In this case, 9,000 acre-feet is about three billion gallons of water.
In the upcoming regular City Council meeting on Feb. 7, Maxwell said he would talk to the council about selling the 9,000 acre-feet of raw water. The target price is 25 cents per thousand gallons, which adds up to about $700,000.
The city manager was emphatic it would be a one-time sale, and there would be no commitment for subsequent years.
“We would make an accounting transfer for 9,000 acre-feet that we have now to somebody else’s account that can divert from the lake,” he said. “The beauty of it is, when the lake fills up, everybody’s account is full again and we start all over.”
Although the sale of about one-half of the city’s water in Cooper Lake sounds ominous in a time of drought, Maxwell said it could present a win-win plan for the city.
There have been discussions of delivering treated water from the city’s wastewater treatment plant to Lake Sulphur Springs. The water sale could go a long way to financing that delivery system.
“The idea is to further secure our water position so we will be able to build a pump station and pipeline and pump it back up to Lake Sulphur Springs and keep our water supply topped off,” Maxwell explained. “There is even a potential that we could continue pumping it to Cooper Lake and sell it to one of the other entities. The way I see it, we use their money to sell them something.”
The city manager said the sale of the water in Cooper Lake would pay for about a fourth of the cost of the pump station and pipeline to transport treated water from the wastewater treatment plant to Lake Sulphur Springs.
The city is expected to hire an engineering firm to evaluate the proposal and its economic feasibility.
“They will run the rough numbers for us — how much water would we be able to take back to Lake Sulphur Springs, what's it really going to cost us and handle the permitting and stuff like that,” Maxwell said.
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