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Bartlesville
Posted: Feb 04, 2025 10:16 AMUpdated: Feb 04, 2025 10:17 AM
City Councilor Aaron Kirkpatrick Talks Water Resources
Tom Davis
Appearing on COMMUNITY CONNECTION, Bartlesville City Councilor Aaron Kirkpatrick talked at length about water resources for the city of Bartlesville.
Kirpatrick said that one of the committees that he is now on is the water resource committee. He talked about the recent drought and spoke optimistically about not only getting the water resources we need now, but also into the next century.
Kirpatrick said the committee has asked the Army Corps of Engineers to raise Hula Lake by 10%, by basically reallocating some more flood control, which he said is a significant amount of water. He added, "Once the water treatment plant is updated to implement the water reuse mechanism by 2030, that'll be another 4 million gallons a day of water that we're already using. That water will be cleaner when we put it back in the river than it was when we pulled it out.
"And then the real big movement," Kirkpatrick said, "was what just happened at the, at the federal level, is that one of the missing pieces that we needed was the option to hopefully, begin to use water that comes out of Copan Lake."
According to Kirkpatrick, the cost was over $7 million to secure those water rights. Our congressional delegates and people who've been working on this a long time went back and in this water bill, they changed the language to lower that price. So now instead of having to pay like seven, seven and a half million dollars for the, for that storage, we're now going to pay like half a million dollars. The impact on all of our water rates will be basically nothing, um, because they got that price down. Now there are still some things to negotiate, but it's just, that's, that's what we can buy the rates with. So now we're, we're doing some negotiating with, with Copan, there's already a memorandum of understanding with them.
Kirkpatrck is really encouraged and he said they are working through these final steps that gives us, in the cities projections, at least another 30 years of water security.
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