ODESSA, Texas — Every city government across Texas, no matter how big or small, needs to keep their paperwork updated.
Recently, the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality has called upon the City of Odessa to make key updates to their Water Conservation and Drought Contingency Plan.
While that does sound drastic, it's actually more of a matter of housekeeping to keep the paperwork in order.
The plan essentially keeps track of how much water is used by a city.
“So there's basically different phases of the plan," said Kevin Niles, the City of Odessa utilities director. "It depends on reservoir levels and how much water that we're currently using in our system that basically kicks in different phases of drought contingency planning.”
As the years pass and cities change, the water plans need to change with it. This is when the TCEQ steps in.
“Every five years, we're required by the TCEQ to make revisions to our drought contingency plan," Niles said. "All we're doing is updating our current population, residencies, household tops and things of that nature. “
While it may sound like the city of Odessa is being singled out for this, they really aren't.
It's a common house call made by the TCEQ to update those key factors.
“You have the population changes, things change as far as our residency, our house, you know, roof tops and things of that nature," Niles said. "We just need to make sure that we stay up to date with all the current rules and regulations that are required by TCEQ.”
While it may sound like a chore, keeping the contingency plans up to date prepares the city of Odessa for that potential worst case scenario where they would have to institute water restrictions.
“This kind of gives us the template that we need to follow. This is basically the rules and regulations that the city council needs to follow to make sure that they are doing what they can to make sure that we are conserving water," Niles said. "We start to get into drought conditions, they follow these regulations and to implement water restrictions.”