A Tale of Two CIPs: Implementing Separate Plans when Development Potential Outweighs Improvement Capability

How do you plan today for significant development, when that development may not occur for 80 years? That was the conundrum facing the City of Kerrville, Texas, as it developed its Water and Wastewater Master Plan. If all the identified growth occurred across the City, total service connections would triple, but the projected buildout would not occur until the 2100 planning period. To address this challenge, the City developed two separate CIPs: one recommending existing system improvements and one recommending improvements intended to serve projected development through the long-term planning horizon. Attendees of this presentation will learn strategies for adapting their master planning process when faced with substantial development potential. The City of Kerrville, Texas, took the initiative to create a road map to proactively plan for the future of the city. The first step of this process was developing and approving their Kerrville 2050 Comprehensive Plan. The next step was performing a Water and Wastewater Master Plan to evaluate, identify, and recommend existing and future infrastructure improvements necessary to serve the anticipated growth. Planning for the future requires an attempt to predict “how”, “when”, and “where” development will occur. The “where” was tackled during the development of the Comprehensive Plan. "Catalyst areas” were identified to predict where development was most likely to occur within the established city limits. Additionally, parcels with known development interest were also identified by the City as potential sources of growth. The Comprehensive Plan, combined with historical water billing data, was utilized to determine the “when” and estimate an annual growth rate based on expected development capacity. Historical billing data could be used to quantify the past annual customer growth and project future growth. Analysis resulted in a projected annual growth rate of 1%, which was also supported by analyses performed during the Comprehensive Plan. However, this created an issue. If all the identified growth occurred across the City, the total service connections would roughly triple and with the estimated 1% annual growth rate, the projected buildout scenario would not occur until the 2100 planning period. The Master Planning team had to consider how to account for growth within a reasonable planning horizon, and then were struck with an idea. Why assume that growth occurs at the same time throughout the City? If one geographic area is developing, wouldn’t it become more attractive to additional development – why not concentrate on planning for growth in separate areas of the City. Thus, strategic “development scenarios” were born. Four “development scenarios” were generated to concentrate the growth geographically relative to existing pressure planes and sewer basins. The development scenarios were utilized to spatially distribute and concentrate the projected growth across the water distribution and wastewater collection system to help assess future capacity and size recommended system improvements. The team was then met with another challenge. Some of the recommended system improvements were triggered solely due to specific large-scale developments. Would it really be fair to the City if they had to budget for an improvement that was reliant on development occurring in a specific area. How could the WEF Collection Systems Conference team best differentiate between projects needed to serve the city in the short-term and projects that would only be triggered with large-scale development? The result of the City’s Water and Wastewater Master Plan became two separate CIPs: one plan detailing recommended existing system improvements to get through today and another recommending improvements intended to serve projected development through the long-term planning horizon. Analyses of the systems were performed for each of these four development scenarios, resulting in the combined growth-driven CIP that provides the City with a long-term plan for the water and wastewater systems. Utilizing separate CIPs will help the City budget, phase, and design their system improvements with both a priority for the existing customers and an eye on future growth. The City can prioritize addressing any existing system deficiencies and still have a plan in place for future growth. The existing system CIP was developed to address existing deficiencies and be implemented over the 25-year planning period. The growth-driven CIP was developed to address both the anticipated growth rate and the identified catalyst and development areas over the long-term planning horizon. The final steps of the City’s utility roadmap are updated rate and impact fee studies to identify potential funding mechanisms for the developed CIPs.