Update: With all of the precincts in Georgetown reporting, 82.66 percent of Georgetown's voters have approved the sale of Georgetown's water territory outside of the city limits and ETJ.
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Early voting results from the May 2 election show residents approving the sale of Georgetown’s water territory outside city limits and the extraterritorial jurisdiction to National Utility Infrastructure, with an overwhelming 82.61 percent of residents voting in favor.
“I think it’s the right thing to do, and I’m excited that the voters understood it and made the right decision,” Georgetown Mayor Josh Schroeder told the Sun Saturday evening. “It’s a complicated deal, and you just hope that everybody understands what’s going on.”
National Utility Infrastructure will purchase the territory for about $60 million. The money would pay off debt associated with Georgetown infrastructure in the sold territory. Any remaining funds will stay in Georgetown Water Utility.
Now that the sale has been okayed by voters, the next steps are taking the plan to Texas’s Public Utility Commission for final approval.
“There’ll be more details [about the sale] that we kind of work out with the buyer as we get closer to the PUC, just in terms of what their plan is for serving the area,” Mr. Schroeder said.
The plan will show how NUI will operate the area, what rates are going to be, what the long-term water plan is, and what NUI’s water system and the city’s water system will look like once they’re separated.
Georgetown’s Water Utility currently serves about 74,000 water customers, 27,000 of whom live within an area that was once the Chisholm Trail Special Utility District, located north of Georgetown and into Bell County.
The Chisholm Trail water territory was acquired by Georgetown about 12 years ago, when it included only about 7,000 customers, who were concerned about the rural utility’s water and infrastructure reliability. Georgetown Water Utility has served the area since.
With the sale’s approval, about 16,900 customers in the Chisholm Trail area will continue to get service from Georgetown, while the remaining 10,000 or so will be transferred to NUI.
The city will continue to provide water to the entire area for up to 10 years while additional water is acquired and secured by National Utility Infrastructure. Parts of the water territory in the ETJs of the Cities of Killeen and Jarrell will be sold to those jurisdictions for about $5,000 each.
The sale reduces the number of future customers Georgetown would have to take on, as residential projects continue to drive growth north of Georgetown into Bell County. This will make it easier for Georgetown’s water utility to acquire water for future Georgetown residents, according to the city.
“It helps us [that the territory was sold], we’ve got a lot of water that we’ve created through the Southlake Water Treatment Plant,” Mr. Schroeder said. “Then as we bring on groundwater that we’re in the process of acquiring, that’s very, very expensive.”
The groundwater the city is buying is bought all at once, so the city will either take the water or pay reservation fees on the water. If some of this water can be supplied through the contract with NUI to the sold water territory while NIU finds a permanent water source, Mr. Schroeder said Georgetown could “defer some of the cost to our customer instead of them having to pay the full reservation fee on the component of the water we’re not using at the beginning of the contract.”