Lavon Lake is one of the North Texas Municipal Water District’s main water sources, supplying the district with about 1,180,000 acre-feet per year. The future Lower Bois d’Arc Creek Reservoir will supply 123,000 acre-feet per year when it comes online in 2020.[/caption]
The North Texas Municipal Water District received a state water rights permit in July from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, marking a milestone for NTMWD’s Lower Bois d-Arc Creek Reservoir project.
The $992 million LBCR project represents one of the water district’s long-term strategies for sustaining the region’s rapid growth. Located in Fannin County, the reservoir is the first of its kind to be constructed in Texas in the past 30 years.
The reservoir is expected to begin operation in 2020 and will serve the district’s 2,200-square-mile region located in parts of nine counties and includes its member cities of Allen, Farmersville, Forney, Frisco, Garland, McKinney, Mesquite, Plano, Princeton, Richardson, Rockwall, Royse City and Wylie.
The TCEQ permit was granted following extensive hydrologic and environmental reviews and a public approval process.
“Obtaining permits and constructing reservoirs is no small feat. Our board of directors, staff and partners deserve the credit for working as a team to achieve this important milestone,” NTMWD Executive Director Tom Kula said in a news release. “This is a huge step toward the goal of meeting our region’s urgent needs today and ensuring that our children and our children’s children will have the quantity and quality of water they need in the future.”
Building a reservoir in Texas requires two permits: one from the TCEQ and a Clean Water Act permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, NTMWD Deputy Director Mike Rickman said.
The latter is still in the review process, as the Environmental Protection Agency has included comments to the Army Corps of Engineers related to the protection of wetlands and hardwoods near the reservoir site, Rickman said.
“We’re hoping to get [the permit] late this year or early next year, but there’s nothing set in stone there,” he said. There’s a process we have to go through to meet certain requirements.”
One of the requirements the district and its member cities had to meet in order to obtain the TCEQ’s permit was the demonstration of effective and collective conservation efforts, Rickman said.
“A lot of the reservoirs we use today were constructed after the drought of the 1950s, and we’ve been living off of those by being good stewards through water conservation,” he said. “But we’ve done everything we could do with [what we have]. We have to show purpose for both permits.”
