With limited options, Corpus Christi focuses on delaying – not avoiding – its looming water crisis
By Colleen DeGuzman, The Texas Tribune
May 29, 2026
Five straight years of record heat, sporadic rainfall and divided leadership has Corpus Christi in danger of becoming the first U.S. city to run short of water.
Only rain — lots of it — can keep the coastal city from that grim fate.
Accessible sources of short-term water, including newly drilled wells, have already been tapped. A controversial desalination plant with the ability to filter seawater — rejected last year over cost and environmental concerns — is back on the table but years away from producing. Building a new lake-size reservoir is another option, but that would take even longer.
Corpus Christi is bracing for demand to exceed water supplies by next summer, leaving far too little time to dodge a crisis by building new infrastructure, said Kenneth Dees, a water resources engineer based in Fort Worth.
At this point, he said, “the only thing that you could do is stop using water.”
City leaders are left searching for ways to delay, not avoid, the looming emergency through conservation efforts, such as mandatory water restrictions and higher fees for exceeding limits.
Mayor Paulette Guajardo said preparing for the next stage of the water emergency has been a difficult balancing act of thinking long-term for the city, collaborating with a divided council and maintaining trust with the community.
“Water security affects everything — growth, public safety, jobs, industry, housing — all of it, and it all weighs on me,” she said.
Residents have expressed growing frustration with the city’s leaders, noting delayed decisions on setting emergency water restrictions and how to enforce them. Council members also will debate next week whether to move forward on building a desalination plant that they rejected nine months ago.
“There’s still time for you guys to turn things around, to work together, as hard as that may seem, and to come up with some good solutions for we the people because right now, you’re failing at the task,” resident Susy Saldana told the City Council earlier this month.
Guajardo said “people are looking for certainty.”
“They want to know their leadership and elected officials are working together to make thoughtful, decisive decisions that move our community forward,” Guajardo continued. “While there have been differing perspectives on council, I believe it’s important that we remain focused on finding common ground and delivering long-term solutions for our residents.”
Ginny Cross, vice president of advocacy for United Corpus Christi Chamber of Commerce, said the city’s business community is on edge, waiting for city leaders to set a game plan. “They have to finalize the drought restrictions, and there’s a lot of unwillingness to make a concrete plan,” she said.
Cross said businesses, worried restrictions could freeze the local economy, want to prepare for mandatory water limits that city leaders have been debating for nearly half a year.
“Everybody’s going to be impacted in ways that we are just beginning to imagine,” she said.
Enacting ordinances and policies restricting water use are among the city’s few remaining tools to slow the looming emergency, said Dees, who has 40 years of experience consulting about water infrastructure projects across the state. “The only thing they can do involves a gavel because at this point, they can’t do anything with a shovel,” he said.
Residents and businesses have already been living under water restrictions since 2024 as two main reservoirs dwindled to puddles. Homeowners have reduced their water use by about 25% in the last couple months, largely by limiting car washing and outdoor watering. All will be asked to cut back even more if the next crisis point arrives, as projected, in December.
“You hope for rain but in the meantime, I believe they really do have to take drastic action,” Dees said of Corpus Christi’s leaders. “They’re going to have to curtail usage because that’s the only thing they can do right now.”
Jarrod Reynolds, a water resources engineer in Hood County who focuses on underground projects, said building water infrastructure is a slow process that can sometimes take decades.
“With time you can build stuff — you can drill wells, you can do desalination, you can do pipeline projects — but every single one of those takes years,” said Reynolds, who works on projects statewide.
Next Tuesday, the City Council is expected to vote on how to enforce 25% mandatory cuts in water use if the city declares a Level 1 emergency — the point when Corpus Christi is six months away from falling short of meeting demand. Oil refineries and petrochemical plants, among the largest water users in the region, would be asked to conserve at the same 25% rate as residents and local businesses.
Corpus Christi is home to the Port of Corpus Chisti and one of the nation’s largest industrial corridors, including crude oil refineries such as Valero Refining and Flint Hills Resources. Together, roughly 20 large industrial companies make up around 60% of the city’s water demand, local officials say.
Complicating conservation efforts is a drought surcharge exemption program that City Manager Peter Zanoni has called an insurance program. Around a dozen industrial companies opted to pay an additional fee to their water bill — 31 cents for every 1,000 gallons — to avoid additional fees during a water crisis.
Isabel Azaira, co-founder of For the Greater Good, a group that opposes a desalination plant that would discharge salty brine into the Corpus Christi Bay, said the city isn’t out of options. “It’s just not willing to entertain all the options,” she said.
Despite industry being the largest consumer, city conservation measures have largely targeted residents — including appeals for shorter showers and turning off faucets while brushing teeth. Azaira said restricting industry’s water usage “is an obvious solution, but that’s not something entertained at all.”
“Rage is not a strong enough word to capture how I feel,” Azaira said. “It blows my mind that we’re more concerned with industry’s profits and single-use plastics and jet fuel than centering the needs of the community and environment.”
Discussions among Corpus Christi leaders in the past few months have mostly fallen into two buckets: greenlighting efforts to streamline short-term water supplies, such as scrambling to drill more than a dozen wells, and preparing for mandatory limits and higher surcharges.
The stakes are even higher because Corpus Christi’s water challenges have a large ripple effect. In addition to the city’s businesses and 318,000 residents, its water system serves more than 200,000 other customers across seven counties. The cities of Alice, Beeville and Mathis are wholesale customers of the city’s water and are also hurrying to drill their way out of a crisis.
Nick Winkelmann, chief operating officer at Corpus Christi Water, said the city has identified wells and other short-term sources that “certainly helped buy us some time” while other efforts continue to diversify and stabilize the long-term water supply.
On Tuesday, the City Council will discuss the water department’s proposal to revive the Inner Harbor Desalination Project, which can provide up to 10 million gallons of drinking water a day. But the soonest it could deliver water, if approved, would be late 2029. The city is also considering desalination plant proposals from two private companies, AXE H2O and Aquatech.
The city is also investing in wastewater recycling, an $11 million project that could produce up to 16 million gallons a day for outdoor use, such as golf courses and parks. Earlier this month, the city approved a contractor to work on that system, but just 60% of the design is complete so far, according to the city manager’s latest water memo.
On a typical summer day, Corpus Christi’s system provides about 130 million gallons of water, Winkelmann said.
City leaders got some positive news in mid-May when heavy rainfall pushed projections of a Level 1 emergency back by three months, from September to December.
“We’re working towards every day to push that date out and eventually take that date completely off the table,” Winkelmann said.
Andrew Coppin, CEO of Ranchbot Monitoring Solutions, a company that helps ranchers track their water usage, said Corpus Christi’s situation should serve as a warning for the rest of the state.
“How many more Corpuses are coming in the next few years?” asked Coppin, based in Fort Worth.
Even after 12 years in the water management businesses, Coppin said, Corpus Christi’s situation still shocks him.
“We’ve got a large city in a first world country — arguably, the most successful first world country on the planet — and it’s running out of water,” he said. “I think what it highlights is the imperative for us to better manage and quantify water.”
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.