Beeville, known as the Gateway to the South Texas Brush Country, has declared a state of local emergency because of drought.
Beeville’s population is just over 13,000, and the city is located about an hour north of Corpus Christi and an hour and a half southeast of San Antonio.
The mayor has issued an official proclamation to request state-level assistance and coordination of additional resources to address the city’s water shortage emergency. The move is an ominous sign for a region that’s been experiencing severe drought conditions for at least four years now, with escalating water conservation efforts proving insufficient.
Interim city manager of Beeville, Daniel Dorgan, said both Lake Corpus Christi and the Choke Canyon Reservoir are way under their usual capacity.
“As of Oct. 8, the combined lake levels were just under 13%,” he said. “We don’t see the lake levels coming up any time soon. And so we are proactively looking for ways to continue with our water as well as identifying a secondary water source in the city of Beeville.”
Dorgan said water is still flowing to residences and businesses, and it is safe to drink. But the city has placed restrictions on how much water people can use.
“According to our drought contingency plan, we have four different stages,” he said. “We had been in stage 3 of our drought contingency plan where our target of consumption is roughly 3 million gallons or less. We have been in that stage since December of 2024.”
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Last week, Dorgan said the city entered stage 4 of the drought contingency plan.
“Our new target is 2.5 million gallons a day,” he said. “So we’re asking residents to really tighten those restrictions and conserve as much water as possible because every drop counts.”
This includes small steps like shortening showers and turning off the tap when you brush your teeth. It also includes bigger changes like not watering your lawn, Dorgan said.
“There is absolutely no watering outside grass, unfortunately,” he said. “Unless you have a water well that’s registered with the city of Beeville, we’re restricting all sprinklers or even just handheld watering outside. Another avenue we went down was we unfortunately did not open the Beeville city pool this year, just because we needed to save water.”
Dorgan said he is hoping the state can provide additional funding needed to get the city access to more water. This would be on top of a $33.8 million bond that the city plans to use to tackle this problem.
“We’re going to rehab two wells that have been in the city since the ’80s, they were capped in the ’80s,” he said. “And then we’re gonna have funding also to drill two additional wells that will get us to our daily demand of roughly four million gallons a day.”
Dorgan said one of his next steps is to find a construction company that can get the ball rolling on these well projects.
“Another thing to kind of reiterate is these wells will be brackish water, unfortunately,” he said. “So we will have to have a reverse osmosis system on each of these well heads. And so the first phase is gonna be creating the reverse osmosis systems, the wells and the pumps. And then eventually as these four individual wells come online, the idea is phase two would be to centralize the four different well sites into one home site or one centralized site in in a particular area of town.”
