With a major shortfall in stimulus money the board will have to make tough funding decisions
AMARILLO, TEXAS -- Cities and municipalities all over Texas will be anxiously awaiting word from the Texas Water Development Board. The Governor appointed board will have 340 million dollars of stimulus money to put towards clean water, and water infrastructure projects.
The major problem is that the board has received around 1 thousand applications, totaling near the 10 billion dollar mark.
Over the next 60-90 days the staff of the TWDB will be ranking the applications and making their recommendations to the board for approval.
"All of those projects will be ranked and of course 10 billion dollars already applied for 340 million, you can understand some of the projects are not going to be funded," said James Herring, Chairman of the Texas Water Development Board.
The TWDB are looking for shovel ready projects that make an immediate impact on the economy, but classify projects into two different categories, Drinking water availability, and sewage or infrastructure.
A law that makes the decisions that much more difficult is that 20% of the funded projects must be "green", really impacting the environment or creating more water efficiency.
"All of those measurements are going to have to be looked at and ranked accordingly and it's a real process. It takes some real judgment and skill to rank those and over the next 60 days that's what the staff is going to be doing," said Herring.
What it boils down to is that some of the cities and municipalities are going to have to look elsewhere for funding, but Herring believes even with the shortfall many worthwhile projects will get done immediately.
"One important thing to take out of this is that the federal government is using stimulus funds right this minute for important projects all across the U.S. and it's focusing on projects that have an immediate impact on the economy," said Herring.
