Utilities Company Aids School and Development
Published Feb 28, 2008
Texarkana Water District is one example of the above-and-beyond collaborative efforts to create a favorable, low-tax business environment that is truly a regional effort.
Like other municipal water companies, Texarkana Water Utilities provides water and sewage services to businesses, homes and schools.
But the company – which serves the city of Texarkana on both sides of the Texas-Arkansas border – has taken on some unusual responsibilities, says executive director Bill King.
“It’s now a water, wastewater and information technology department for both cities,” says King, who has been answering to the city managers of Texarkana, Texas, and Texarkana, Arkansas, since 1991.
In addition to handling those services, the Texarkana Water Utilities also operates what King calls “a very good greenways disposal site (for grasses, limbs and leaves) and composting program.”
And the responsibilities of the 59-year-old department “certainly keep evolving,” he says “We can sell the compost back to the public at a nominal price and that helps keep sewer rates down,” King says. There also are two sites for dropping off used motor oil, so it can be recycled.
King’s department is charged with computer maintenance to the two cities.
Texarkana Water Utilities also is responsible for Geographic Information Services, which provides aerial photography that displays where sewer lines, highways, railroad lines and the like are located. King says the next step for this “major development tool” is to get it on the Internet, “so someone in Oregon can look at a site here” and see what the infrastructure is while plotting economic development.
And a major new innovation has been making the school districts partners in stringing fiber-optic cables through the two cities.
The cables are connected to utility poles throughout both Texarkanas, serving public agencies as well as tracking problems at sewer and water facilities.
“We worked out an arrangement with the schools: If they paid for the hardware, we’d put it up,” King says, so when the cable passes the schools, they are added onto the network.
King is proud of what Texarkana Water Utilities has done with the cooperation of the two municipal governments.
“It is a very unusual arrangement,” he says. “In my opinion it has been extremely successful.”
Story by Tim Ghianni
Photo by staff
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