Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The City Council held a workshop on March 31, 2026, to receive a briefing on the Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) and discuss potential measures to address ongoing drought conditions. Staff from Corpus Christi Water (CCW) presented the history of the plan, current drought stages, and recommendations for baselines, surcharges, allocations, and enforcement. Council members raised questions about the applicability of the drought surcharge exemption fee during a level one water emergency, baseline calculations for different customer classes, enforcement mechanisms, and the impact on residents and businesses. No formal action was taken; the briefing was for informational purposes only.
Key Outcomes
Okay, good morning. I'd like to call this meeting to order. Uh, Miss uh Wetter, would you please call the role? Mayor Palette Wahardo present. Council members roll in Baretta. Here. Sylvia Campos. Eric Anthou. Gillard Nandes. Here. Caitlin Paxson. He's absent. Everett Roy. Here. Mark Scott. Carolyn Bonn. Okay, Ms. Vaughn is here. I think she just stepped out in the back. City Manager Peter Zanoni. Present. City Attorney Mouse Resley. Mayor and Council, a quorum of the council, and the required charter officers are present to conduct the meeting. Excuse me, what we're going to do, if you'll go to your workshop agenda, is we're going to go through the fur without questions. We're going to go through the presentation of drought contingency plan history and overview. The third one would be baseline usage allocations and curtailment. So after that bullet, then we'll do question and answer. Um, and and each council member will have two terms to speak at five minutes uh uh time. So, Mr. Winkleman please start your presentation. Thank you, Mayor and Council. Nick Winkleman, Chief Operating Officer Corpus Christi Water. Thank you for the opportunity to be here to present this uh important and critical subject. Presenting today will be myself. Uh we will have Michael Dice, interim assistant city manager presenting one slide as well, and then also in support, we have Jeff Stovall and Michael Pinckney. They are with Corolla Engineers. They are heavily involved in our dashboard modeling and supporting our efforts in establishing uh baseline amounts for each of our customer classes. Before I get into the presentation, I do want to just take a moment and thank the city team and CCW for all the hard work that they've done throughout this entire throughout this last year. Uh the team staff continues to work six to seven days a week. Tremendous work is being done on our new water supply projects, and certainly many city departments were involved in this presentation as well. With that, so we we thank all of them. Let's go ahead and get started. Today we'll talk about uh a little bit of history on the drought contingency plan. Uh we will review surcharges, baseline usage determination, allocations, then we will go into new water meter connections. We will briefly discuss car washing and swimming pools, and we will discuss um as well as some updates to the depth definitions in the drought contingency plan, and we will conclude with next steps. The history of the drought contingency plan. Uh, we would like to point out Corpus Christi, our city was the first city in Texas to develop a water conservation and drought contingency plan as a combined policy that was done in 1986. In 2013, our council decided to separate these two plans into two distinct documents.