Rio Hondo water plant back in compliance

RIO HONDO — After five years of violations, the city’s water plant is back in compliance — but just barely, city officials said this past week.

Officials thought the city had 935 water connections, but a door-to-door count found 891 homes connected to 743 water meters. When 11 more homes are added, the city will fall back into noncompliance, officials said.

City commissioners were ready to launch a $5.2 million project to build a new water plant as a result of inflated water connection numbers, Mayor Alonzo Garza said.

Now they’re considering whether to build a new plant or expand the existing plant, officials said.

“It’s a relief,” Garza said. “There was something wrong with this picture, but we looked into it.”

The city reported for years to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that it had 935 water connections, Albert Cabrera, the public works director, said.

The state had cited the city for being 3 percent over its capacity to treat water since 2005, Terry Clawson, an agency spokesman in Austin, said.

Then in 2007, Cabrera, who started working for the city in 2006, noticed that the plant built to treat a maximum capacity of 790,000 gallons of water a day was pumping an average of 400,000 gallons.

So Cabrera began a door-to-door count that showed the different numbers.
“I counted each and every hookup,” he said.

In March, he submitted the results of his survey to the state, Cabrera said.

Last month, the information led the state to lift the city’s violation status, Clawson said.
Cabrera said he found that about 148 of the city’s 891 homes were hooked up to master water meters that serve more than one home.

So the new figures put the city in compliance by only 11 water connections, Cabrera said.
The water plant will fall out of compliance when the number of homes reaches 901, Cabrera said.

“We’re on the borderline,” he said.

Now officials are considering whether to pursue plans to build a new water plant or expand the existing plant.

“We’ve got the state off our backs so this gives us some room to breathe,” Commissioner Gloria Barrientos said. “We have to look at all options.”

Officials had planned to borrow $3.6 million, payable over 40 years, to build a new plant that would more than double capacity to 1.8 million gallons a day. As part of the project, the U.S. Department of Agriculture would give the city a $1.7 million grant to build the plant.

Construction of a new plant would force the city to increase water rates by about 25 percent, Barrientos said.

Garza said the city’s flat monthly water rate stands at $26.

The water plant’s expansion and renovation would cost about $1 million, Cabrera said. The city could try to find grant money to fund the project, he said.

Officials have also discussed entering into a contract with the East Rio Hondo Water Supply Corp. to buy water to help the plant reduce water capacity.

Garza said he wants to know why the city had inflated the number of water connections that led the state to cite it for violations.

“It could be a miscalculation of numbers,” he said.

Barrientos said past city officials likely counted each home as having a water meter.