The Texas Spur is honored to have won this year’s Texas Press Association Community Service competition for weekly newspapers (see story, page 8).
Winning isn’t the point, though.
Helping change things is. And that’s an ongoing challenge.
Our entry cover letter, below, summarized a dozen news articles, explanatory pieces and editorials pointing to the problems with Spur’s drinking water system—not as an isolated case, but as typical of all the communities our newspapers cover.
And while Spur has made some progress in 2021 thanks to a long-awaited grant, it’s a drop in the bucket. The problem remains urgent.
“Aging pipes in Texas cities are getting more fragile,” read a Texas Tribune story a few weeks ago. “Texas had 3,866 water boil notices in 2021, the most in the last decade. Aging water systems threaten water supply and quality — and for many small towns across the state, they won’t be cheap to repair.”
We’ll continue to report on the situation throughout our coverage area.
For the vast majority of Texas communities of all sizes following October 2020’s Winter Storm Billy and February 2021’s Uri, the biggest public utility challenge by far was electrical power.
But in Spur (as in numerous small towns in our regions like Dickens, Jayton and Turkey) the lingering challenge in the storm’s aftermath was municipal drinking water.
Customers of Spur city water and sewer immediately felt the pain at their pocketbooks, with major water bills and plumbing repairs after the severe freeze and eventual thaw. Nursing homes and hospitals in our area were without safe drinking water for days, amid Covid-19 protocols. Restaurants could not open. Businesses, and cultural establishments like Spur’s 1929 Palace Theater, shuttered for some time while repairs were made. City crews worked long hours in cold and mud. Bottled water was in short supply.
To responsibly address the public’s numerous frustrations and questions, The Texas Spur recognized we would need to dive deeper into the longstanding problems with the city’s water and sewer systems. We would have to research the technology, understand how the block grant and other funding sources worked, and diligently follow deliberations of public bodies such as water boards that we weren’t accustomed to covering.
Spur’s fragile water infrastructure was already at constant risk of rupture before Uri. An original system dated to the city’s founding in 1909, when residents hauled barrels from a public well, and later, gradually, as supply and drain pipes from a water tank were laid beneath streets. In 1960 the White River was impounded to provide water for four cities, including Spur, and the major pipeline travels 12 miles from there. Water lines to supply individual customers are six decades old, and in the 21st century are subject to constant breakage and leakage. Line location maps are inadequate, labor to make repairs is insufficient, and major funding, in a town with a severely shrinking tax base, is, well, a pipe dream.
As Texas Spur reporters met with city and water officials, we shared all of this learning with our readers, distilling technical matters as clearly as we could in news stories and editorials. We posted public notices clearly. We also reported in more-than-usual detail about the deliberations of the White River Municipal Water Authority (which was in the final stages of federally funded improvements to its plant and headquarters) and the Spur City Council (which in early 2021 discovered flaws in the Community Development Block Grant that had been in the works for five years, to replace an intermittently nonfunctioning sewer lift station). In our social media we posted promptly every time we learned of a water leak, a repair, a boil water notice, or a rescind notice.
Also participating in a University of Texas think-tank project in 2020, we came to realize how dependable drinking water supply is the root of all problems in previously thriving West Texas small towns. Where there are constant battles against leaks and no realistic source of funds to fix them, businesses, industry, and residents will not choose to come here even if real estate prices are amazingly low; in their absence, struggling retailers will defer maintenance on signature downtown properties, and low-income renters and buyers (who may likewise be unable to improve their homes’ infrastructure) will become the norm; and elected officials will give up on what seem to be overwhelming odds.
The Texas Spur is committed to helping reverse that trend, by educating and advocating. We hope it works.
- Log in or Subscribe to post comments.
