May 18—Joplin officials continue to position the city to ensure an adequate water supply for the future.
A $2.5 million allocation designated for water supply was on the list of projects for the city’s three-eighths-cent capital improvements sales tax voters renewed on April 2.
Dan Johnson, the city’s public works director, confirmed after a Monday council work session where water resources were discussed that the allocation is to be available for a regional effort to pipe water from Stockton Lake to the Joplin area if needed in the future.
Roddy Rogers, executive director of Southwest Missouri Water, a nonprofit seeking to secure additional water supplies for 16 Southwest Missouri counties, spoke at the work session. He talked about the increasing cost of water that is now being propelled by Wall Street trading of water as a commodity.
He said Southwest Missouri Water is still working to obtain permits from the Army Corps of Engineers to eventually tap into Stockton Lake and pipe water from there to the Joplin area. Rogers said that may take years and then there would be a need to build the pipelines to transport the water from the lake 90 miles northeast of Joplin.
“What we do with Southwest Missouri Water involves a lot of foresight and a lot of planning,” he said.
The American Water Works Association produced an outlook on water availability in 2050, and Rogers says “the long term view is the key to water’s future.”
“We’ve got to drive our future. We can’t wait for it to come to us” when it comes to planning for future water resources, he said.
“We are right on target with what we’ve been doing with what is going on with the global water industry,” he said.
Ownership of a share of the resource is an asset that could eventually be sold to another member of the coalition if the city did not need the water.
He noted that Joplin is the location where the coalition effort was started by the city and Missouri American, the utility providing water to Joplin. In a 2003 meeting at Joplin City Hall, members voted to form a joint municipal utility commission to create a water supply district to identify and secure potential new future sources of water for the growing region. The group first used the name Tri-State Water Coalition.
Since then, the coalition has reorganized with only representatives of Southwest Missouri. Rogers said it was determined that water from Missouri sources could not be exported into Kansas and Oklahoma, which had given the coalition its Tri-State name. So the focus became Southwest Missouri.
Stockton Lake was identified as the nearest and best resource to feed this area. It would be available to supplement a 1,500-acre reservoir near Shoal Creek in an area southeast of Joplin that Missouri American plans to build. The reservoir is needed to help address a projected shortfall in the area’s long-term water supply, but it might not meet all long-term future needs, Rogers said. That’s why Missouri American and Joplin need to have the Stockton Lake option, which would involve piping water from Stockton to the reservoir, he said.
Currently, about 85% of Joplin’s water comes from Shoal Creek, but the supply is supplemented by wells, according to Missouri American.
However, the reservoir plan has met with opposition from some of the 50 landowners who would be affected. The site is on the east side of Interstate 49 north of Route MM, west of Nighthawk Road, and south of Elder Road.
Some landowners in the area of the proposed reservoir oppose the effort and contracted a study that resulted in an opinion that the proposed location for the reservoir will not hold water. The company’s own analysis concluded it is a workable site. Eminent domain will remain an option but is not the first choice, Missouri American officials have said.
Permitting by the Army Corps of Engineers also is needed to establish the reservoir.
The water company reported that its most recent work on the permit has involved submitting information to the Corps of Engineers to draft an environmental assessment on wetland and stream impacts the reservoir would have as part of the permit process.
Field studies have been completed for threatened and endangered species associated with the project, the company reported. Those include Indiana bats, northern long-eared bats and gray bats, Ozark cavefish, Neosho mucket, rabbitsfoot, western fanshell and purple lilliput.
However, the reservoir alone will not be enough in the future to provide adequate water, particularly in long periods of drought, to the growing Joplin area, Rogers said. That is why Stockton Lake as a feeder is an important resource.
A Department of Natural Resources study in 2010 projected population growth in Jasper and Newton counties could grow from 180,000 to 220,000 by 2030. New sources of water could be needed then, coalition members said then.
“What better way to the future for the city to own some of that water itself and Missouri American owns some?” Rogers told the council.
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