At Terlingua Ranch, a sprawling desert subdivision near Big Bend National Park, growing water demand from more people moving to the area is prompting property managers to launch a new four-stage water conservation plan, a first-of-its-kind measure for the rural community.
The entity that oversees the rules at Terlingua Ranch says starting in September, property owners there will be subject to certain restrictions on how much non-potable water they can buy from the subdivision, depending on how the local water well supply is doing at any given time.
For more on the plan, Marfa Public Radio spoke with Brad Anthenat, board president of the Property Owners Association of Terlingua Ranch Inc.
Interview Highlights
What prompted the plan
According to Anthenat, the POATRI board of directors has been looking at the issue of growing water demand in Terlingua Ranch for a while now.
The subdivision has one primary well used for non-potable water sales to property owners, he said, but that well has been “struggling to keep up with demand.”
“Just during the drought seasons, it has a hard time keeping up with the pressures that are being put on it,” he said.
The new conservation plan outlines four stages of restrictions on non-potable water sales that would be enacted if the well drops below certain levels. While the plan is new, it stems from the association’s earlier conservation efforts.
“Last year, we put a plan in place of limiting property owners to 500 gallons every two weeks that they could purchase,” Anthenat said. “What we’re seeing is, there’s still a lot of demand on that well.”
Where the growing water demand is coming from
Terlingua Ranch continues to see a growing influx of property owners, Anthenat said, and those that don’t have their own water source on their property turn to the association for non-potable water.
“So we’re seeing increases of water sales on that well during a time when we’re in the middle of pretty significant drought, and that well is just not able to produce as much water,” he said.
Anthenat said he does not have a sense of how much of the growing demand stems from Airbnbs and other short-term rentals, which have dramatically increased in number across the Big Bend region in recent years.
The association is not allowed to “discriminate” between property owners when it comes to water sales, Anthenat said.
“If an account holder comes to purchase water from us, we don’t try to determine if they’re just an individual or a business purchasing water from us,” he said. “We have to treat all accounts the same.”
Monitoring the well and what the future holds
“We’re still learning,” Anthenat said about how POATRI will monitor the well’s levels.
“We’re putting monitoring devices in the well, so that we can see how much water is in the well from a week-to-week basis, and that’ll allow us to help make these decisions,” he said.
The overall goal, Anthenat said, is to “protect the well and to keep it from going dry.”
As to whether the new conservation plan will be enough to protect the subdivision’s non-potable well from the strain of growing demand, Anthenat said it’s “a big unknown.”
“What we can tell is that the current well struggles to keep up with the current demand,” he said. “If that demand were to continue to increase, some concerns would be that it could possibly go dry.”
