AMARILLO, TEXAS -- Not much was on the Amarillo City Commission agenda today, but what was a key presentation.
It dealt with the state of Amarillo's water resources, its water system, and the important elements that affect that system.
Jarrett Atkinson and Emmett Autrey put things together for the meeting by gathering water use data from the past few years.
Amarillo's consumption had actually been dropping,- but not recently, it's been too dry.
"Citizens of Amarillo are using more water than they did this time last year," said Emmett Autrey, Director of Utilities.
But city officials did say we are still in the hunt for buying more water rights.
Autrey says those are good things to have.
"It only becomes more valuable with time and if someday we fell that we've got too much water, heaven forbid, we could be able to sell it and I'm sure the price would be a lot higher then."
But how does the city go about funding the purchase of more rights?
"Your aquisitional water rights, your contruction work to develope and to use water rights, your infrastructure, they're all funded the same. They are funded generally either pay as you go or through debt that is secured and repayed by the revenue from the system," said Atkinson, Amarillo City Manager
And with all this talk of acquiring more water rights, it makes you wonder, how does our water future look?
"Several of them are going north of 200 years and I would suggest thats better than any normal city has in Texas."
But even though we may be in good standing, Autrey says that doesn't mean we should abuse it.
"This time of year we're also putting an emphasis on water conservation which we do every year anywhere from March to April to May, we start kicking up our water conservation.
In the end, city officials concluded, we are in excellent water shape as a city, and we've saved more than 200,000,000,000 gallons of re-used water from the auqifer.
