Water expansion plan seen as economic, workforce boon

Jonas Arjes: Industrial site selection often comes down to available infrastructure, including water.

Fresh water is a finite resource, and companies are on the move to find it, according to development officials.

In January, a portion of Stockton Lake was reallocated to provide drinking water and industrial water supply to communities participating in Southwest Missouri Water, whose website describes it as a coalition of the water providers working to ensure an adequate and sustainable water supply for southwest Missouri.

The agreement will make available some 38 million gallons of water per day – a move SWMO Water says in a news release will close about half the gap between the available supply and projected demand for the region through the year 2060 while having no significant impact on the lake.

City Utilities of Springfield will receive about 30% of the water allocation, according to SWMO Water Executive Director Roddy Rogers, who says the additional water supply will cost them only “pennies” more.

SWMO Water predicts the allocation will inject close to $1 billion and thousands of jobs into the Missouri economy.

About a million people are represented by SWMO Water, which is made up of the Tri State Water Resource Coalition and the Southwest Missouri Joint Municipal Water Utility Commission. The securing of water from Stockton Lake is the culmination of more than two decades of effort between these entities and the Army Corps of Engineers and Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

Rogers said this is something he worked on in his previous 37-year career with City Utilities of Springfield, where he managed a water department with a peak capacity of 70 million gallons per day.

“We talked about securing water for our future, but really, water is our future – if there’s no water, there’s no future,” he said.

Rogers said water is a huge economic driver, needed for products as diverse as pizza, cellphones and T-shirts.

“It all takes water,” he said. “Water’s money. Water’s jobs.”

Rogers said additional requests for allocations have been submitted to the Army Corps of Engineers for portions of Table Rock and Pomme de Terre lakes. SWMO Water can’t take a breather, Rogers said, because it needs to get contracts in place with the corps and with member utilities and start planning for the next water source.

Studies take a long time, he said, because the corps has to determine the impact on the lake. The Stockton Lake allocation was granted because they saw no significant impact, he said.

“What we’re asking for in terms of water supply, they lose more to evaporation off that lake in one year than what we would eventually get,” he said.

He added that the amount the region needs for drinking water is very small compared to the amount used by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Southwestern Power Administration to generate power through turbines on the lake.

Rogers said he was with CU when an earlier reallocation of water storage from Stockton Lake was OK’d in the mid-1990s.

“We would not have gotten through the droughts of the ’90s and 2000s without it,” he said. “You can’t wait until you need it – it takes too long to get it.”

At that time, CU navigated the reallocation on its own, Rogers said, but now the whole southwest Missouri region is on board.

“We’re all going to need that water,” Rogers said. “It makes sense to cooperate, rather than compete for the same water.”

Rogers said on the market, the allocation would cost about $235 million, but SWMO Water’s cost is going to be around $27 million, to be paid to the Army Corps of Engineers. He added that pipelines will be needed to move the water, but the cost per mile of water pipeline is about a quarter of what we spend for a mile of highway.

There will be rate impacts to consumers, Rogers said, but those will amount to pennies, relatively. Even so, SWMO Water will work to get funding to help alleviate costs.

“It’s a small amount to pay for water,” he said. “We can pour it, treat it and deliver it, but we can’t create it.”

A 2024 UNESCO report states half of the world’s population experiences severe water scarcity for at least part of the year, and water deficits were linked to a 10% increase in global migration from 1970 to 2000. Additionally, global demand for fresh water has increased by nearly 1% each year since the 1980s.

The U.S. Geological Survey reported earlier this year that nearly 30 million Americans live in areas with limited water supplies, primarily the Southwest, the Central and Northern High Plains, the Central Rockies, Texas and California, and many of those supplies are threatened by pollution and climate change.

The Springfield metropolitan statistical area is experiencing in-migration from other states, with a growth rate of 3.1% from 2020-23, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.

Development impact
Jonas Arjes, senior vice president of economic development with the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce, said availability of water – and infrastructure to carry it – is crucial to companies engaged in industrial site selection.

Arjes said his office has seen pretty good project activity recently, with a half-dozen requests for information in the first three months of the year through the Missouri Partnership, a public-private economic development organization focused on bringing investment to the state. Springfield met the criteria for only one of those, Arjes said, noting infrastructure limitations can knock a city out of the running pretty quickly.

“We had one prospect that we could not submit due to the fact that the natural gas requirement was a significant portion of City Utilities’ output of natural gas – 12% to 16%, a pretty big number, and we couldn’t do that,” he said.

He said over the last several years, electricity has been the key infrastructure component for which need has been increasing. An example is electricity-hungry data centers, some of which would pull more electricity from the grid than CU could spare.

“The ability to serve those increased demands has gotten more difficult all over the country,” he said.

The allocation sends a message to most potential site selectors that water is available for their factories.

Ben Vickers, the chamber’s business development manager, said the population in the state’s southwest region has exploded over the last few years and is projected to keep growing more quickly than the rest of the state.

“That really gives us a good opportunity to continue attracting and retaining people,” he said. “Even though you and I aren’t thinking about where our water comes from, we do care about low utility rates and access to drinking water, and that’s something that helps us attract and keep members of the workforce.”

He added that one of the area’s targeted industries is food manufacturing.

“Water is super critical to that,” he said, citing companies like Ozarks Coca-Cola/Dr Pepper Bottling Co., Kraft Heinz Co. and the French’s Food Co. LLC, all of which require a strong supply of fresh water as part of their manufacturing processes.

Krista Shurtz, vice president of natural gas and water operations for City Utilities, said the allocation gets CU past 2060 for future water needs.

Shurtz noted the allocation will have benefits for business.

“That provides some security for job resiliency and growth in the future,” she said. “Water is so vital to the growth of the area, and securing a future water source is important.”

Shurtz said CU had expected to pay about $15 million for the new allocation, but because of the work SWMO Water has done with legislators, the cost is now projected at less than $9 million.

“That’s not a final number, but it’s significantly less than what we thought,” she said.