Water for Presidio County’s unincorporated areas
The Presidio County commissioners have been exploring a couple of different options to address the water challenges confronting the unincorporated areas of Candelaria, Ruidosa, Redford, Shafter and Las Pampas. One idea being pushed by County Attorney Rod Ponton involves the creation of a Water Control and Improvement District (WCID, pronounced “wicked”). A WCID is a taxing entity that would be governed by a board of five elected directors. A petition to form a WCID must be approved by at least 51% of property owners within its proposed boundaries.
One of the arguments that is often made in favor of a WCID is that it would enable the unincorporated areas to take care of their own needs while alleviating the burden on the county to jump in every time one of these communities runs into trouble. In pushing for the creation of a WCID at a recent commissioners court meeting, Mr. Ponton also asserted that a WCID could go after grant funding and loans to pay for its water infrastructure instead of relying on the county.
This thinking is somewhat flawed. The county’s bond counsel, Paul Braden, who worked on securing the $4.6 million in EDAP funding from the Texas Water Development Board, has repeatedly questioned the wisdom of creating a WCID because of the difficulty in getting voters to approve a new property tax. The cities of Presidio and Marfa (and their taxpayers) would not be included within the WCID, greatly shrinking the effective tax base. And the petition effort and election to approve the creation of the WCID are not going to be cheap.
The county attorney has also been silent about the expenses involved in the maintenance of a new taxing entity. Like the hospital district, school district and groundwater district, a WCID will have to pay a fee in the range of tens of thousands of dollars every year to the County Tax Assessor’s Office to levy its property taxes. The WCID will also have to pay for annual audits of its finances and for the elections of its board members, which can also run into many tens of thousands of dollars. The current water rates paid by residents of the unincorporated areas will not be enough to cover these new expenses and the needs of their water systems.
Even if all of these expenses could be satisfactorily justified, the main argument for creating a WCID is also nebulous because it remains unclear how many grants and loans the unincorporated areas actually need to build and maintain their water systems. Meanwhile, any such loans would have to be paid with property taxes levied by the WCID on a small fraction of the county’s taxpayers. The commissioners need to ask themselves: Does it really make sense to create a new taxing entity with growing expenses that would have to be paid year in and year out in perpetuity?
Another solution is to set up the county’s Utility Board. This entity can do just about everything a WCID can do without levying taxes or racking up the annual expenses of a taxing entity. Formation of a Utility Board is also a condition of the EDAP loan and is thus required anyway. It would be governed by a five-member board to be appointed by the county commissioners and would enable the existing public water supply corporations to band together, pool resources, and jointly hire an operator to keep their water systems in compliance with the law.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Ponton is pushing the county to create both a WCID and a Utility Board. “This is not an either/or answer,” he wrote in a rare email. “Both paths may be followed on parallel tracks.” This is typical of the legal excellence we have come to expect from Mr. Ponton, which is one of the many reasons why the voters fired him effective January 1, 2025. The commissioners would be wise to prevent Mr. Ponton from creating any more messes that he won’t be around to clean up.
We must accept that our tiny tax base can scarcely support the considerable expenses of yet another taxing entity. The commissioners should get the Utility Board up and running. The unincorporated areas need to do their part by serving on that board. And the funding the county is already receiving for the unincorporated areas must be put to work serving those communities. While not perfect, a Utility Board is the most cost-effective path forward because it combines the tenacity of the unincorporated areas with the human resources of the county government and the borrowing power of the entire county to ensure safe drinking water for our most underserved residents without the ongoing annual overhead of a runt taxing entity.
Trey Gerfers is a San Antonio native and serves as general manager of the Presidio County Underground Water Conservation District. He has lived in Marfa since 2013.