Rural Texas not getting fair share of state bonds for water projects

Erin Douglas reports for the Texas Tribune.  Here's the subhead:

Rural Texas communities often don’t have the resources, technical experience, or ability to take on large amounts of debt to pursue state funds for water supply and quality projects. So, many simply don’t apply.

This is a familiar rural story--including here on Legal Ruralism--small towns and nonmetro counties with insufficient bandwidth and developed human capital to seek these funds--not to mention the inability to take on debt. 

Here's an excerpt:  

Rural areas of Texas receive only a fraction of a percent of bonds for state water plan projects, far less than what lawmakers intended nearly a decade ago when the program was conceived, a state report shows.

The Texas Water Development Board is entrusted with billions of state dollars to issue bonds, provide loans and disburse grants for water supply, wastewater treatment, flood control and conservation projects. One of its programs, the State Water Implementation Fund for Texas, or SWIFT, issues bonds to provide low-cost loans to finance water supply projects.

But while that program has committed $9 billion to help finance projects in the state water plan since 2015, the agency has failed to meet its legislative target to provide 10% of those funds to rural communities and agricultural water conservation, according to a report by the staff of the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission, which evaluates the performance of state agencies.

Instead, only 0.17% went to rural communities between 2016 and 2020.

The report said the agency needs to bolster outreach efforts in rural and economically disadvantaged areas of the state and better track all of its programs to understand the barriers small communities face to apply.

Rural areas with small populations struggle to apply for loans, Texas water finance experts and water managers in rural communities said, because they lack the technical expertise to submit an application. Some don’t even know the programs exist. Plus, such communities often don’t have the population base, political support or local matching funds required to take on large amounts of debt, even with low interest rates or favorable terms.