Corpus Christi voters will decide in November whether to end a 2018 arrangement that lets the city's largest industrial water users skip drought fines, after a seawater desalination plant meant to make the region "drought proof" ballooned in cost and never got built.
A review of public records by Inside Climate News and The Texas Newsroom, published Monday by The Texas Tribune, traces how the plan took shape and why it came apart.
How the deal worked
In 2018, the City Council unanimously agreed that big water users, including refineries and chemical plants, could avoid drought surcharges if they paid an immediate water-rate increase of about 8%. That fee was meant to repay state loans for a desalination plant.
At first, city staff priced a 10-million-gallon-a-day plant at $140 million. By 2020 the plan had doubled to 20 million gallons and about $220 million, and staff said the industry fee would cover only two-thirds of the loan payments.
By early 2024 officials wanted a plant three times the original size, estimated at $757 million, with about $68 million a year in debt payments against roughly $6 million a year from the fee. In July 2025, the builder put the price at $1.2 billion.
That September, after a 13-hour meeting, the council fired the contractor. The city has spent at least $50 million on the project, according to the report, and staff have warned it would have to repay $235 million in state loans plus about $70 million in interest if the project is abandoned.
