Across Texas, water scarcity is no longer a distant environmental concern. It’s now a reality already reshaping how communities live, plan and survive. In 2025, Texan cities like Beeville and San Marcos are navigating distinct, but connected, water challenges, ranging from drought-driven infrastructure failures to long-term population pressures. Both municipalities are taking urgent steps to address the present crisis while preparing for an increasingly dry future.

In February, residents of Beeville experienced the unthinkable, as the water flowing from their taps suddenly stopped. For a community of 13,000 people in Bee County, this wasn’t just an inconvenience, but an existential shock into action.

“The problem started when a leak was found on our raw water line that provides water from Lake Corpus Christi to our water treatment plant,” said Beeville City Manager John Benson. What began as a single breach quickly spiraled into widespread outages. At one point, bottled water had to be distributed, and a boil water notice was issued.

But the broken pipe was only part of the story. Beneath the surface, literally and figuratively, a deeper threat was emerging: the slow collapse of Beeville’s primary water source.

“Lake Corpus Christi is our main water source,” Benson explained. “But the lake level has been declining steadily over the past few years. By late last year, it dropped to a point where our intake structure wasn’t even in the lake anymore. It’s now only within the boundaries of the lake because the water has receded so far.”

As of mid-2025, the lake hovers at under 30% capacity. “We’re now totally dependent on the Nueces River itself,” Benson said. “We’ve had divers out at the intake structure regularly over the last six weeks. The water is hovering around just 8 feet above our lowest intake point. That’s incredibly low, and we know the pumps will start failing at some point. We’re just trying to figure out when.”

To answer that question and chart a path forward, Beeville has partnered with Garver Engineering to conduct a system-wide evaluation. In the meantime, the city is operating under Stage 3 of its drought contingency plan, which is the most severe level. That means mandatory restrictions for the community, such as no lawn watering, no washing cars with running water, no watering driveways or foundations or anything else that requires excessive water usage.

“It’s about conserving every drop we can at this point,” Benson said.

But Beeville isn’t just relying on restrictions. The city is pursuing a bold two-phase plan to pivot from surface water to groundwater. The first phase involves rehabilitating two previously capped wells and drilling two more. However, the water from these deep aquifers is brackish and requires reverse osmosis before it’s safe for consumption. That means portable treatment units, or “reverse osmosis on skids,” as Benson said, will be deployed to process water on-site at the wells for an immediate solution.

In the long term, these skids will be relocated to a centralized treatment facility, connected by a new conveyance system. One of the biggest concerns for the city at this time is the financing, as the entire project is slated to cost about $30 million.

“Funding is a huge question,” Benson acknowledged. “The state of Texas has done a good job of making resources available — more than a billion dollars a year — and the EPA has programs, too, but those are harder to access. In the meantime, we’re looking at bonds and other financing options.”

Amid this planning, Beeville is confronting immediate quality concerns as well. With lake levels so low, organic materials are more concentrated in the remaining water, leading to discoloration and increased customer complaints. “We’re still treating the water, but people are still, understandably, concerned,” Benson said.

To keep the community informed and engaged, Beeville has doubled down on transparency. The city maintains a public website, beevillewater.com, to share updates, conservation tips and plans for improvement. It is also working with the local school district on an awareness campaign called “A Day Without Water,” designed to educate students about the importance of water and what it means to live without it.

“Raising awareness, reducing demand, rethinking water,” Benson said. “That’s what we’re trying to do at this time.”

While Beeville scrambles to keep water flowing today, another Texas city, San Marcos, is looking toward tomorrow. This city of over 70,000 has not yet experienced widespread outages, but the writing is on the wall. Drought, coupled with rapid population growth, is placing an unsustainable strain on water resources like the San Marcos River and the Edwards Aquifer.

To respond, city leaders have also activated their drought contingency plan and imposed outdoor watering restrictions. But they’re also taking a long-term view by pushing for sustainable building codes, smart meters and investment in water reuse infrastructure.

San Marcos is embracing innovation, from rebates on low-flow appliances to exploring alternative sources like aquifer storage and recovery. Data and modeling tools are helping the city better understand consumption trends, while regional collaboration ensures that planning isn’t done in isolation.

The stories of Beeville and San Marcos represent two sides of the same challenge. One community was jolted into action by a sudden failure; the other is acting to prevent that day from happening. Both cities help to show how fragile the water supply has become in parts of Texas and how resourceful local governments must be to meet that challenge.

Beeville’s rapid switch to groundwater, though expensive, is an example of decisive local leadership under pressure. San Marcos’s emphasis on planning, technology and policy reform shows how proactive approaches can insulate a city from crisis.

Water scarcity in Texas is no longer hypothetical. It’s here and actively causing concerns. The question now is whether communities can build the infrastructure, obtain funding and draw public support to meet the moment. If they do, it won’t just be about surviving drought, but it will be about transforming how we live in an era of water scarcity.

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