City’s groundwater topic of public meeting

Almost 50 citizens attended a public meeting to discuss selling groundwater from the City of Clarendon to Greenbelt Water Authority last Tuesday night, April 17, at the Bairfield Activity Center.

City Administrator Lambert Little welcomed those in attendance and introduced Clarendon’s representative on the Greenbelt board, Gary Campbell, who gave a brief history of Greenbelt and discussed the problems facing the lake as well as a possible solution.

Campbell told the crowd that Greenbelt Lake has only about six or seven months of water remaining if rain doesn’t replenish the reservoir or the area experiences another summer like last year’s.

“We’ve got to do something, and we’ve got to do it quickly,” Campbell said.

Campbell outlined some options for the water authority – water from a gravel pit below the dam, acquiring water rights from the Ogallala Aquifer miles from the reservoir, or buying other water rights. But another option, Campbell said, would be cheaper and easier – re-opening Clarendon’s municipal wells and buying water from the city.

“There is water here in abundance if Clarendon will allow Greenbelt access to it for a price,” Campbell said, noting that by grandfathering the permits for those wells and using an existing easement for a pipeline back to the filter plant, Greenbelt could be pumping the city’s groundwater in a matter of four or five months.

If Clarendon chooses not to sell its water to Greenbelt, the water authority will likely just buy rights from nearby farmers, and pump the same underground pool of water anyway.

“We’re giving Clarendon first right of refusal to sell its water,” he said.

Greenbelt General Manager Bobbie Kidd said the authority has been studying alternative water sources since 2007, and he said alternative solutions are more expensive and would require funding through the state water development board, which doesn’t have money currently. The Clarendon option, he said, would be good supplemental water when mixed with surface water from the lake.

Kidd also said other Greenbelt member cities do not have as good or as plentiful a water source as Clarendon does.

In responding to questions from the public, Kidd said the Clarendon Aldermen would set the price for selling water to Greenbelt, and Campbell said using the city’s water is only a supplemental solution and that the water authority would continue to explore other longterm groundwater solutions.

Asked about sending the water out of Clarendon or across the state, Greenbelt representatives said the water could only go as far as their pipeline, which is five counties. Greenbelt serves Clarendon, Hedley, Childress, Quanah, and Crowell and also provides water to Red River Water Authority, which provides the water to rural systems such as Estelline.

Members of the public expressed concerns about equitable conservation measures among the Greenbelt member cities and a desire to focus on conservation – such as rainwater harvesting. The city using the water for its own consumption was discussed, but officials said the city is bound to Greenbelt through 2026 and doesn’t have the resources to develop its own wells and treatment facilities and hire the people needed to run such a system.

Mayor Larry Hicks said the city should sell Greenbelt its groundwater in order to help neighboring cities and also to bring the city some needed revenue, which would be put back into the infrastructure for its water system.

Addressing concerns about selling water downstate, groundwater board member Jason Green said he sells his own groundwater downstate every day… in the form of hay, and he urged people to stick together so people all down the line can have good water.