Water districts
The Chisholm Trail Special Utility District board of directors voted 4-3 on April 18 to deny an agreement that would have merged the water utility with the City of Georgetown utility systems.
The board's vote effectively ends the possibility of a merger between the two utilities, said Keith Walker, Chisholm Trail SUD interim city manager.
"Right now is just kind of step back, let the dust settle from this and move forward from there," he said, "but the old agreement is dead, yes."
The two utilities have been discussing the proposed merger for about 18 months, Georgetown Utility Manager Jim Briggs said. In December 2011, the City Council and Chisholm Trail SUD board of directors each approved $100,000 to complete a feasibility study.
The agreement was expected to help ensure water supplies for future growth and keep water rates stable, he said. Briggs said he has reached out to the SUD for future options, but has had no official response. The city had set a deadline of April 22 for a decision on the agreement.
The City Council is expected to discuss legal matters related to the contract and possible strategies related to the contract or other existing contracts in executive session and could discuss other options, including possible exchanges of territory with the SUD, in open session at its regular meeting April 23.
"We've still got issues that we have to resolve that go back to 2011," Briggs said. "If we didn't do consolidation, we still have two other options that are out there that we were authorized to pursue. We've got to look at those for exchange of service territory. The issues not dead; it's that the consolidation could be dead, and it's most likely not moving forward, but I still have two other issues on the table that have to be resolved."
Walker said the complexity of merging a large, spread out service territory with the city were some of the reasons the board voted down the agreement.
"It's a difficult process; it's a complex process especially with a city utility. A city has several thousand customers packed into a tight area, and we have a few thousand customers spread across 377 square miles of territory," Walker said. "They are two completely different systems, so merging them was going to be a challenge."
He also attributed the board's denial to the lack of customer voting rights once the agreement was in place and the board was dissolved.
"Initially the board couldn't get the enforceability written into the agreement that they wanted," he said. "The issue being that the district would have been overseen by the Georgetown City Council, and they would have final say on whatever happened with the district going on operationally, and none of the district's customers would have any voting rights in the city of Georgetown. That was one of the biggest concerns, having no representation and no enforceability once the district was dissolved."
Walker said the board would most likely move forward as an independent organization.
"I think we all have to remember that city was requested to take this on at the request of the [Chisholm Trail SUD] board," Briggs said. "That's what we did. The city was accused of trying to take over the district, which is what it was asked to do."
The city was approached in summer 2011 by residents in several neighborhoods in the city's western extraterritorial jurisdiction, or ETJ, to transfer into the city's water utility.
About two-thirds of Chisholm Trail SUD's water customers live in or near the city's ETJ.
