Fort Worth: At A Glance

The City of Fort Worth’s water conservation scorecard performance has remained the same at 78 points, but behind this score, the City has made marginal improvements with the addition of one best management practice and more ambitious conservation targets. Fort Worth, continues to struggle with controlling water loss but has addressed this ongoing issue with an advanced water loss detection and repair program. The City is certainly on the right track towards achieving its 2024 conservation targets.

Summary

The City of Fort Worth provides retail water and sewer service to approximately 820,000 residents and wholesale water service to 33 wholesale customers. Service through wholesale customers accounts for approximately 440,000 additional residents. In total, Fort Worth provides water directly or indirectly to nearly 1.3 million people in Tarrant, Denton, Johnson, Parker and Wise counties. The city purchases their water (all surface sources) from six major reservoirs: Lake Bridgeport, Eagle Mountain Lake, Lake Worth, Lake Benbrook, Cedar Creek Reservoir, and the Richland-Chambers Reservoir.

Though the City’s water conservation score has not changed since 2016, Fort Worth continues to make slow but sure progress when it comes to water conservation. The City in its 2019 WCP has set ambitious conservation goals as it did in the past. In its 2014 WCP, as of 2013, Fort Worth’s 5-year average water-use rate had been 171 GPCD and the City set a 5-year target of 160 GPCD by 2020, slightly higher than the minimum 1% per year reduction rate for municipal water suppliers suggested by a State task force in 2004. As of today, Fort Worth has surpassed that goal – with a total GPCD of 159 – and set a strong goal of reaching 140 GPCD by 2024, a 2% water use reduction annually. This ambitious goal will likely be met thanks to water conservation strategies such as the implementation of no-more-than-twice-a-week outdoor watering restrictions and a rate structure that sends at least a moderate water conservation pricing signal.

While the City of Fort Worth has made progress, there are ways in which the City could improve, reinforce, and support what it is trying to achieve. The single most significant way Fort Worth could do so would be to address its high water loss, which was reported as 16.8% in the 2018 Water Loss Audit. The City would also benefit from taking even more steps to curtail water use for outdoor landscaping by adopting a no-more-than-once-per-week outdoor watering restriction.