The goal of the Southwest Missouri Water/Missouri State University Regional Water Conference Tuesday in Springfield was to educate stakeholders and water providers about a solution to meet the area’s future water needs, according to Roddy Rogers, executive director of SW MO Water.
Rogers said it’s a solution that’s inexpensive and doable if the cost is divided among water users in the region.
SWMO Water has been working for 17 years to get a new allocation of water from Stockton Lake that would meet the needs of a 16-county area through at least 2060. Those counties are: Greene, Taney, Jasper, Barry, Barton, Cedar, Christian, Dade, Hickory, St. Clair, Lawrence, McDonald, Newton, Polk, Stone and Vernon Counties.
But Rogers said the end is in sight.
"There's several steps between us at the district level," he said, "and then it goes to several national offices. Then it goes to the director of civil works in Washington. That's who just signed it. And then after that it's the ASA (assistant secretary of the Army) at the Pentagon. That's the last step. So he has recommended to the ASA to sign this. So like I said, we're crossing the big ocean, we can see the shore. We're almost there."
If the allocation is granted, which Rogers hopes will happen by the end of the year, infrastructure will have to be built to bring the water from Stockton Lake to other parts of southwest Missouri. He said that could take about a decade. Individual households would see water rate increases to pay for it, but, according to Rogers, those would amount to “pennies per day.”
Rogers said, to meet the region’s water needs beyond 2060, they’ve put in a request to take water from Pomme de Terre and Table Rock Lakes.
