Many residents in McLendon-Chisholm woke up to no running water on Wednesday, July 13, 2022, because RCH Water Supply was trying to stay within contracted levels with the City of Rockwall. Of course, many received mixed messages from RCH that gave the appearance that it was the City of Rockwall shutting off the water. The City of Rockwall is pumping 2.1 million gallons of water per day to McLendon-Chisholm, which is well over normal usage levels for a single day. The assumption is that due to excessive outdoor watering, residents’ usage levels have exceeded this amount by about 1 million gallons EXTRA per day for the last several weeks. [SEE FIGURE 1]
2022 RCH WATER SUPPLY
WATER CONSUMPTION REPORT
Subscribers Received Minimal Notifications
1st ALERT. RCH Water Supply started issuing orders via text alerts on July 11, 2022 at 11am that RCH is implementing watering schedule implementation for outdoor watering with irrigation or sprinkler systems and to not water between 9am to 5pm.
2nd ALERT. At 9:59am, Tuesday, July 12, 2022 another alert, “No outside watering until further notice due to extremely high use and demand, no outside watering is permitted until further notice.”
Fox News Reporter Lori Brown asked, “Could this happen again this week?”
“Maybe if people don’t get the message how serious the supply issue is.” Dwight Lindop, RCH Water Field Technician
At the Tuesday, July 12, 2022 McLendon-Chisholm City Council meeting, the RCH Board President Jackie Pullen is asking for the customers (3,000 RCH meters) to not use the irrigation systems. Instead, to use your garden hose to water your gardens and/or foundations. Jackie Pullen also mentioned back in April the usage was 578K (April 4, 2022). Mr. Pullen also spent time speaking with our McLendon-Chisholm Fire Chief Jim Simmons regarding pressure issues. They are aware and are being vigilant of our situation. Mr. Pullen also stated that RCH is working on becoming a member of the (NTMWD). However, other member cities in the district would need to vote for them. He believes that this will resolve the supply issues and avoid going through Rockwall.
Are We In Trouble In Not Meeting
Essential Services?
YES. After careful review of the latest RCH Contract that I requested from the City of Rockwall it revealed a number of issues that confirms that our growing rural community of approximately 4,250 and local elected officials should make every effort to do their part to remedy this immediately.
Mayor Keith Short, Mayor Pro Tem Trudy Woessner and our McLendon-Chisholm Fire Chief Jim Simmons have reviewed my concerns and will be doing their part accordingly. I don’t want residents to think that the McLendon-Chisholm City Council are in the dark, but are taking this seriously and have been making efforts on their end as well. Also the Sonoma Verde developers have contracted with trucking in water from another source for construction to deliver the water necessary for the remaining Phase 4C of 43 lots, Phase 3 of 169 lots and Phase 5 of 79 lots.
WHOLESALE WATER PURCHASE AGREEMENT BETWEEN
ROCKWALL AND RCH WATER SERVICE CORP.
*The maximum number of equivalent residential connections shall equal to the lesser of either (i) the maximum daily rate of flow divided by 0.6gpm or (ii) the storage available to RCH within the portion of the distribution served by the delivery point divided by 300 gallons for each connection or equivalent connection within the portion of the distribution system served by the delivery point.
The volumes and rates of supply specifies that it may be subject to reductions if Rockwall has to implement a contingency or water conservation plan which may reduce the amount of water available to RCH or the other customers going through the City of Rockwall. If you look at [Figure 1] you will see on June 8, 2022 we exceeded at 2.934mgd. Many customers were not notified, nor did RCH turn off the valves on customers to restore the low tank levels.
So What Was The Trigger?
City of Rockwall did enact their water ordinance on Tuesday, July 12, 2022. The Rockwall City Council enacted the ordinance in 2019, following years of severe drought in North Texas, as a measure to stave off future supply issues. The ordinance limits outdoor lawn and landscape irrigation to only two days a week. In addition, it strictly prohibits lawn watering during daytime hours between 10am and 6pm.
This explains why RCH was trying to adhere to the contractual obligation of 2.1mgd. However, if you look a bit further into the numbers you clearly see that we have way more meters than originally agreed upon in 2014.
RCH has been increasing the demand by artificially increasing the number of meters. RCH has failed to address their contractual agreement with Rockwall. There has been zero effort to return annually to discuss these increases with the Rockwall City Council. Furthermore, no steps have been taken to find any alternative source or administrative work done to seek to become a NTMWD customer.
The public comments made by Jackie Pullen that RCH has 3,000 meters is substantially more meters than the 2014 amendment in the signed contract. Through additional open records request, I obtained a Summary of Projected Growth and Population [FIGURE 4]. These projections are well over the contracted 1,359 residential connections in the contract, and have been for many years.
Board Governance
In addition, RCH approved service requests when they had NO BUSINESS approving for a new connection which could result in exceeding their Rockwall contracted 1.2 mgd.
The RCH Board is failing to meet basic Texas Open Meetings Act, Chapter 551, Texas Government Code. It’s written in their own RCH Bylaws. Meetings have been cancelled to avoid the public attending, doors have been locked and you can’t send an email to request what you would like to see on the agenda. There is no listing of the board agendas nor are there minutes on the website. If you do wish to receive the agenda and minutes you must call Robin Baley, H20 Services who is the contractor administrator for RCH WS. She will print and send the documents to you through the U.S. Postal Services. Yes, I have had to do this with Ms. Baley. It is absolutely unacceptable that the board of directors is allowing this to take place and it is certainly a lack of transparency.
Who Are The Board Members?
Jackie Pullen, president
Warren Hodges, vice-president
Gary Lovell, director
Lowell English, director
Odis Lowe, secretary
Steve Hatfield, director
Ms. Baley also appears to be managing Forney Lake Water services too. On that website, it lists the names of the board of directors and lists the links of their board agenda meetings in 2021. In similar fashion of using social distancing as a crutch it lists the meetings are held monthly via Zoom.
Steps for RCH Water Service Corp To Improve
New leadership is needed to serve on the board of directors that will make good faith efforts to achieve the administrative changes required by law, governance and the Certificate of Convenience and Necessity (CCN). For now, the CCN may give RCH WS the exclusive right to provide retail water. However, Chapter 13 of the Texas Water Code requires a CCN holder to provide continuous and adequate service to the area within its CCN boundary.
For those interested in volunteering to help turn the RCH WS ship around please consider filling out the Board of Director application*.
*Unless they have updated their bylaws, which is highly unlikely, one of the candidate requirements is a majority of the board of directors shall be engaged in farming.
The next RCH board of directors meeting should take place on Wednesday, August 3, 2022 at 2pm. My hope is to have excellent candidate applications provided to Mr. Pullen by next week. In addition to that I’m hoping for Mr. Pullen to agree to have the following items on the agenda:
• Accept candidate applications.
• Discuss to apply as NTMWD customer, 6 year Engineering Study and all the matters related to show good faith effort.
• Discuss administration and management changes of the day-to-day RCH Operations.
• Discuss and review a process to improve customer communications with regular news, website updates, projects, reports, etc.
• Discuss with the engineer about meeting the requirements that is recommended.
• Discuss and review reports of infrastructure needed to accommodate current meters and growth.
• Discuss and review a calendar of monthly board meetings to post on the website, etc.
• Discuss and review financial reports, outstanding debts, assets, etc.
• Discuss employment positions that will improve customer service, billing, operators, etc.
• Discuss a location improvement to accommodate public attendance of board of director meetings.
RCH board president will need to give direction to Robin Baley to apply the above items for their agenda at their next board meeting. (First Wednesday, August 3, 2022 at 2pm)
Rockwall may agree when the climate conditions return to normal for a little more mgd temporarily, but it won’t cover for the potential growth coming real soon. Rockwall is not going to address the infrastructure problem. And considering how RCH has been out of compliance RCH customers need to express to the Rockwall City Council that we are going to make efforts to hold RCH accountable. We can’t wait around for a government agency to swoop in to save the day.
We Are At AN Extreme Critical Stage for MANDATORY CHANGES
We have amazing people right here in our community and I want to believe that RCH Board of Directors wants to take the steps to make things right. I believe the current board just needs help to improve what they already have. What they have currently is not sustainable and clearly we do not want to experience a supply problem again.
1) Please help by building awareness with your friends and neighbors by sharing this blog post.
2) If you know someone that is an excellent person with management skills and has a great attitude to volunteer to be a candidate please encourage them to fill out the application for Board of Director.
If Mr. Pullen and/or RCH doesn’t show concerted effort to accept new candidates, discuss the above agenda, improve their customer communications, agree to post board agenda/minutes or pursue the process of becoming a NTMWD customer, then one of my goals will be to spend considerable time reaching out to RCH customers to pursue an alternative qualified CCN provider.