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Canadian River Municipal Water Authority: A Guaranteed Supply for North Texas
Sanford Dam and Lake Meredith.
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native of the Texas Panhandle, Kent Satterwhite is only the second general manager in the more-than50‑year history of the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority (CRMWA). The CRMWA is situated in the Texas Panhandle and meets most of the raw water needs of its 11 member cities, which in turn serve nearly 600,000 people. In addition to providing surface water from its Lake Meredith Reservoir, CRMWA has perhaps the largest groundwater rights holdings in the nation, ensuring its viability far into the future. In this interview, CRMWA General Manager Kent Satterwhite tells Municipal Water Leader about the authority’s history and services. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
30 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | July/August 2020
Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about CRMWA’s history. Kent Satterwhite: CRMWA was created to provide its member cities and the citizens of the Texas Panhandle and the South Plains a dependable and safe source of municipal and industrial water. This is a semiarid region, and prior to the creation of CRMWA, the communities here relied solely on water drawn from the Ogallala aquifer. The first well in the aquifer in this area was drilled in 1911, and by 1953, there were more than 25,000 wells. Because soil and climate conditions in this area are not conducive to significant recharge, they were draining the aquifer at an unsustainable rate. That led people to start thinking about a dependable alternative. Municipal Water Leader: After that need was identified, how did CRMWA emerge, and what are its services today? Kent Satterwhite: The period from the initial vision to the creation of a fully operational authority covered more than 15 years, beginning in the early 1950s and lasting to the late 1960s. This initiative was led by committed and forwardthinking individuals across a vast area. CRMWA itself was ultimately formed by the Texas Legislature, which allowed the municipalwaterleader.com
PHOTO COURTESY OF CRMWA.
Kent Satterwhite: I’m originally from the Texas Panhandle. After high school, I left the the area to pursue a civil engineering degree with an emphasis in water resources at Texas A&M University. I got distracted along the way and came to own and operate an excavation company and later a swimming pool construction company. I ultimately earned my degree later in life and began looking for water-related jobs close back in the Texas Panhandle, where I had grown up and where my parents and in-laws lived. I began by contacting local groundwater districts and ended up talking to John Williams, CRMWA’s first general manager. I have been
with the authority for 30 years now, and in 2001, I took over from him as general manager—the organization’s second.
