City staff outline multiple water-supply paths: Nueces River wells producing now; Evangeline, Inner Harbor remain options

City staff presented an updated water-supply briefing that lays out short-, medium- and long-term options intended to keep the city supplied while western reservoir storage declines.

Drew Molly, the citysystems project lead, said the city is "discharging today anywhere between 5 to 7,000,000 gallons a day of water into the river" from newly drilled wells as part of the Nueces River Groundwater Well Project. He described the effort as a two-phase program: a near-term phase that is producing raw groundwater now and a conceptual longer-term phase that could feed a brackish reverse-osmosis (RO) plant.

Molly and water-systems staff described the Eastern Well Field as able to sustain roughly 11,000,000 gallons per day based on monitoring and hydrogeologic analysis; staff reported the city has eight production wells nearly complete in the Eastern Well Field and that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) issued a bed-and-banks permit in early August allowing the city to lawfully discharge well water into the Nueces River. The Western Well Field is under development; a test well and geological logging show…