Clay Sellers: Got questions about the Brazos. No more unknowns. Ever wonder where that water comes from or where it goes? We're Unpacking the Brazos River.
Charlie L Shugart: The Brazos River Authority chased down a new water right that basically manifested more water without anyone having to move a single shovel full of dirt. I can already hear you asking, "How do you create more water?” We're focusing on the revolutionary strategy that led to the water right application the BRA filed back in 2004. It was a massive first for Texas and a playbook that protects your tap, your community, and the future of Texas. I'm Charlie Shugart, and this is Unpacking the Brazos River. Let's get into it. Returning again to this podcast is Aaron Abel, BRA's water services manager, and Peyton Lisenby, BRA's senior water resources planner. Welcome back, guys.
Aaron Abel: Thanks for having us.
Charlie L Shugart: Thanks for coming in. So, let's talk water rights. For everyone listening, if you missed episode four, do yourself a solid - pause, go back and do that. It's a thirty-eight-minute deep dive into all things water rights. We're gonna do the SparkNotes version here. But if you're the type of person who geeks out over the nitty-gritty details, that episode is your best friend. So, let's start with just the highlights of what a water permit is for everyone.
Peyton Lisenby: So, a water right is, in its most basic form, simply a permission from the state that authorizes the holder of the water right to use surface water. And by use, that involves either impounding it and/or diverting it from a state water course. And then from there, it can be used for what are called beneficial uses, municipal uses, irrigation, things like that.
Charlie L Shugart: So, when you said permission from the state, who are we talking about?
Peyton Lisenby: So, the state agency that is tasked with issuing water rights and evaluating water right applications is the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. We call them the TCEQ.
Charlie L Shugart: So, one of the questions we get is what is the difference, or is there a difference, between a water right permit and a BRA contract?
Peyton Lisenby: A water right, like I said, is a state-regulated permission. Right? It's a state authorization. BRA, we apply to the state and have applied to the state to get our water rights. From our water rights, we can create a reliable supply of water because we have permission from the state to impound water. We can manage a system that creates a reliable supply of water to make available to users. For folks to use the water that we've made available from our water rights, they would enter into a contract with us. And so a BRA contract is just an agreement between BRA and a water use customer that ultimately leverages the water rights BRA got from TCEQ. To make the water available to the end user or other wholesale providers, or industry, cities, things like that.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. So how many water right permits do we have?
Peyton Lisenby: BRA has 16 proper water rights and one system order. The system order is another state authorization, but it's not a water right per se, but it does give us additional flexibility in how we use our other water rights.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay. Okay. And are we the only ones in the Brazos River Basin that have water rights?
Peyton Lisenby: No. Not by a long shot. There are many, many, many other users in the Brazos Basin, and I think the total amount of active water rights is over 1,700.
Charlie L Shugart: Oh, wow.
Peyton Lisenby: But I will say that BRA is the largest water right holder in terms of the number of water rights and total volume of water authorized for us to use.
Charlie L Shugart: So, are these water rights ever amended, or once we get them, do they stay the same?
Peyton Lisenby: So, yeah, you can amend a water right. And in fact, that's very common. You know, not just us, but folks across the basin. Things change over time. The place where you wanted to divert water in the past may not be the exact same place you wanna divert it in the future, and so that's one of the things that you gotta let the state know if you change.
Charlie L Shugart: Today, we wanna talk about one specific water right, and this is the one that the BRA filed back in 2004, which was the first of its kind in Texas. Talk to me about this. Tell me about this permit.
Aaron Abel: I think it's important for everybody to know that the System Operation Permit that was granted to BRA was the first of its kind in Texas. And if you ask folks at TCEQ, it's the most complicated water right in Texas.
Peyton Lisenby: We were forging a new path.
Charlie L Shugart: Right.
Peyton Lisenby: Certainly, with the SysOps Permit. A lot of new conventions and maybe even new approaches to water right permitting came along as we were doing this, as needed, because the permit was unprecedented.
Charlie L Shugart: Right.
Aaron Abel: BRA was side by side with Texas Parks and Wildlife and TCEQ during the development of that, due to our System Operation Permit. We forged a new path, and we did a lot of things that had never been done before, both from a permitting perspective, but also developing science related to what the environment needs in terms of environmental flow standards.
Peyton Lisenby: And the SysOps Permit obviously is one of the first permits to have the standards applied to it in the permit. You say unprecedented a lot. There were multiple things where it's like, well, each step you take is a brand new step, and then you keep accumulating new things you keep having to do to get through the application process.
Aaron Abel: The System Operation Permit was contemplated even back in the 1960s. With systems like BRA and other systems of reservoirs, you have multiple reservoirs. Right? And you can coordinate the system in terms of releases from one part of the reservoir, holding water in another part of the reservoir. And through that coordinated system, there is an increased efficiency in terms of the amount of water that can be provided overall. But in the 1960s, there wasn't a tool, if you will, that could quantify the realization of a system operation, the function of using a system of reservoirs in a coordinated manner.
Charlie L Shugart: The idea was there.
Aaron Abel: The idea was there, and there was a lot of research that had gone on, really, probably even before the 1960s. Honestly, if you looked at most of the reservoirs that were constructed across the United States, you could argue that it kinda really started in the ‘30s. Probably the bulk of the reservoirs have, you know, wrapped up in maybe the ‘80s. I mean, obviously, there are some more planned reservoirs in the future. That tool that was needed to quantify what a System Operation Permit could do from a water rights perspective was created in the late ‘90’s, early 2000s, and that was the Water Rights Analysis Package, or it's called WRAP. And the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality uses WRAP for permitting purposes. So that's the tool that they use to quantify the impacts of those water rights and the operation of the water rights. And so once that happened, once we had that tool, I guess BRA began thinking of, we can submit an application for a System Operation Permit. That's kinda how I guess the genesis of the System Operation Permit occurred.
Charlie L Shugart: Where exactly is the water coming from for this permit?
Peyton Lisenby: So, with regard to efficiency, the name of the game is reducing losses. Right? When it comes to system operation, what you are trying to do is, instead of operating each of your reservoirs independently, like they're their own island of water for whatever supplies are needed from that location, you can operate reservoirs acknowledging the existence of other reservoirs. Right? Each of our reservoirs has different characteristics that govern how much accommodation space they have to capture new inflows. You have to imagine that inflows are pouring into reservoirs 24/7. I mean, to some extent, whether they're very small during dry periods or very large during floods, inflows are always coming in. With water supply and reservoirs, the name of the game is, can you capture those inflows and hold them until you need to use them? Right? Those inflows are not as useful if you just have to watch them go by. Because the timing's off. You want to hold the water and keep it for some amount of time, however short or long, until the use is there, the need for the use. And so each of our reservoirs they're all different sizes. They have all different-sized drainage areas upstream, the amount of space that actually can accumulate rainfall and drain it to the reservoir. And then, because the basin is so large, there's a pretty steep climatological gradient as well, from pretty arid to much more humid, across our 11 reservoir system. And so, all those factors mean that our reservoirs at any different time may be in different stages of being able to hold additional water. And that's key because if you can't hold water, if your reservoir's full, which is good, but there's inflows coming in, you have to pass those inflows downstream. And those are called spills when the reservoir is spilling. And spilling from a supply standpoint is akin to a loss because you're not able to hold that water for any amount of time and wait for it to be needed. It's just going downstream. And spills are the kind of dominant loss in any reservoir system. Evaporation's also very important. But on the whole, added up over time, spills are probably the more important thing to try and reduce if we're trying to reduce system losses. Evaporation's like a close second. And so with system operations, the idea is that if you have a reservoir that is easy to fill up, whether because it has a large drainage area or because the reservoir's very small or because it's in a very wet place that rains a whole bunch, then that reservoir is gonna spill a lot. So, your losses are gonna be quite high. If you can use that reservoir in a way where instead of using perhaps another reservoir that may be larger, but if you use the smaller one or the one with a larger drainage area or the one that has more inflows coming into it, if you use it more, that creates accommodation space in the reservoir to capture more inflows, so there's fewer spills. And so that's a very, very simplified example. Right? Mathematically, if you can apply that concept across time and space to a bigger system and reduce the losses, you create additional supply. System losses over time go down, and so you have the supply, then as Aaron mentioned, can you demonstrate it's there in a reliable manner and quantitatively show TCEQ, this is real water. This is real water that you can issue a water right for. And it wasn't until, you know, the Water Rights Analysis Package, the WRAP package, was developed that we could quantify that to a permitting standard, to a standard high enough to where TCEQ could issue a water right for it. With the development of WRAP and the water availability models, we call those the WAMs, those are the datasets. Those are the numbers, essentially, that represent the system's supply configuration, all the water rights, all the reservoir locations, all the diversion points. Those are all the numbers, and then WRAP is the math, essentially. WRAP does math to those numbers to tell a story of how water gets used, what's available, and what's not available. When all that was developed, we could produce a model that demonstrated, by applying principles of system operation, additional supplies available above and beyond what is there simply because the reservoirs exist.
Charlie L Shugart: So, do other agencies or river authorities use a water availability model?
Aaron Abel: Yes. All river basins within Texas have a water availability model that TCEQ maintains and uses for permitting. And that's anywhere from East Texas, you know, Sabine all the way to the Rio Grande and all the river basins in between.
Charlie L Shugart: So, you're saying we're gonna use the reservoir that tends to have more water because it has more spill versus the ones that don't have as much. When you say that, what do you mean by using that water?
Peyton Lisenby: So, by use, you're taking that water whether you're pumping it out of the reservoir for some use, or you're releasing it from, a deliberate release, a controlled release. Either way, you are taking water away from the reservoir and creating more space in the reservoir to capture more inflows. Right? And so BRA, like I mentioned before, has had the system order that allows us a lot of flexibility in how we manage the supply of our individual reservoirs. We got the system order back in the ‘60s, and we've been using coordinated system operations with the system order for decades. It wasn't a question of, can we actually do system operations and then get a permit? We're already doing the system operations. Now, with the SysOps Permit, we were demonstrating the additional supply made available by those system operations and getting that additional supply permitted for use.
Aaron Abel: From TCEQ, you have to have an authorization to divert a certain amount of water at a certain location. And before, without the System Operation Permit, we couldn't utilize that quantifiable increased yield associated with operating the system as a system.
Charlie L Shugart: So, if so, okay. Help me a little. If we needed that permit from TCEQ to say we could use that water, how were we operating them as a system prior to that permit?
Peyton Lisenby: Prior to that permit, we had a system of reservoirs that all had their own individual authorizations. Not only to impound the water, to hold it in the puddle, divert from the puddle for use. Okay? And those all existed independently.
Charlie L Shugart: So, we had different water rights for each of the …
Peyton Lisenby: Yup, different pots of water with their own water right. The system order allowed us to manage the system holistically in that for a given reservoir, we could use that reservoir and account for the usage against the system total rather than the supply from that single reservoir. For example, if it was raining cats and dogs in one part of the basin and another part of the basin downstream needed water, we're gonna use the reservoirs that it's constantly raining on. We're gonna use the water that's readily available. We're not gonna use the reservoirs where it hadn't been raining in its dry. We're gonna hold that water still. And so if you end up using one portion of the basin a lot, because it's constantly raining and there's constantly inflows coming in, the lake's staying full even though we're using it. But we may start to bump up against the individual authorization of what we can divert from that lake. System order says, ‘Don't worry about that. Count your usage against the system total, not that lake's individual total.’ And so that's how we were using coordinated system operations using the system order. However, we were still limited to the system total, which was just a sum of the individual reservoirs.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay.
Peyton Lisenby: With our SysOps Permit, it says, not only do you have a system total that is the sum of your individual reservoirs, but because you've been doing system operations, there's this new supply of water. Because you've been using your reservoirs in a clever way, now you can divert more on top of what was available from the system of individual reservoirs and actually use that additional supply.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay. I think I'm there. So, this strategy of using all of the different reservoirs, using the ones that have more water because of the spills versus using the ones that don't have as much water, is that kind of the whole thing in regards to SysOps?
Peyton Lisenby: It's a major part of it. There is another component that involves the reservoirs, but this time, instead of using reservoirs in a coordinated way between multiple reservoirs, it's using them in coordination with naturally occurring flows downstream. What we call run-of-river flows. So, all of these reservoirs are impoundments on a river. So downstream, there are river channels that have naturally occurring rainfall runoff that accumulates in them and flows downstream. There are a myriad of different flows, and when I say, I'm using that word like flow volumes. Amounts of water in the river that during wet times, they're there and they're usable, but those flows may not be there all the time. They may not persist through drier times. However, if you can use your reservoir releases and time it with the flows downstream, when those flows aren't available, you can supplement them or back them up with a reservoir release so that over time, those flows are better maintained and more reliable. And so that's the kind of the other side of the coin of system operations is not only can you make additional supply available across your system of reservoirs by reducing losses, you can also make additional supply available run-of-river by augmenting flows that may be there in wet times, but in dry times, you back them up with reservoir releases so that they stay there. And at that point, it becomes something that you can demonstrate as reliable enough to get a water right.
Charlie L Shugart: So, prior to getting the SysOps Permit, if there was water in the river already, how did that affect how we were releasing water?
Aaron Abel: So, some of our customers have their own water rights. And, you know, those are, you know, primarily downstream, of the reservoir system along the Brazos River Basin and they were able to divert that run-of-river or natural occurring flows for their own purposes under their own water right. Some customers of ours don’t have water rights, and we couldn't take advantage of those naturally occurring flows, so we had to release stored water.
Charlie L Shugart: OK, so, if the Brazos River, for instance, had a lot of water because it's been raining a whole bunch, because we have a customer in that general area who didn't have a water right and needed water from us, even though the water was in the river, we had to release water from one of the reservoirs to get to them.
Aaron Abel: Yes. Just thinking about it, you're like, golly, that's not efficient. The flows in the river that are naturally occurring, in wet times, that can satisfy everybody.
Charlie L Shugart: Right.
Aaron Abel: In addition to satisfying everybody downstream, there could be a little bit more that could be diverted and, assuming that all special conditions are met under our permit, and that's kinda what we're talking about related to diverting naturally occurring or run-of-river flows associated with the System Operation Permit, and then backing obviously backing that up, as Peyton said, with stored water, to come to a firm, 100% reliable quantity of water at a certain location.
Charlie L Shugart: Literally, making new water by keeping that water in the reservoir versus having to release it downstream, we’re saving that water for other stuff. Okay. So, the system operations part of it, using it as a whole, and then the river run, that kinda is what makes up SysOps?
Peyton Lisenby: That's what I would think in terms of, like, when you say system operations, what are you doing? Well, you're using the individual elements of your system in a way that creates additional supply. Yeah. So those two things are what I think of as SysOps. It's not all of SysOps in terms of the SysOps.
Charlie L Shugart: Ok.
Aaron Abel: There’s more.
Peyton Lisenby: Our System Operation Permit is called the SysOps Permit because of the kind of unprecedented and new strategy in getting the water right and demonstrating this new water available. But it's not the only supply of water that permit makes available. There's more.
Charlie L Shugart: Well, go for it. Tell me what those are.
Peyton Lisenby: The third and final component of our System Operation Permit is the appropriation. I don't know if we've used the word "appropriation" before, but that is the word to describe what TCEQ does when it lets you use water. It appropriates it to you.
Aaron Abel: It's a legal term.
Peyton Lisenby: Yeah. So I sometimes use "authorization" or "appropriation" interchangeably. They're probably not the same. But I don't worry about that too much. Is the appropriation of what we call return flows. Return flows are discharges into a state watercourse from a wastewater treatment plant. So, wastewater treatment plants, obviously, take wastewater generated from some previous use, so water that came from a source somewhere, surface or groundwater supply. It was used for something and then entered into a wastewater system, essentially piped to a wastewater treatment plant. It's treated up to an appropriate standard and then discharged into a state watercourse. Now, as soon as it's discharged, as soon as it's dumped back into a river, that's the state's water again. And naturally, you have to ask the state permission if you wanna use it. So, this occurs all over the state. There are thousands of wastewater treatment plants in Texas. Right? And you have to imagine that, you know, at any given time across any given major waterway, there are lots of wastewater treatment plants discharging water into it. And so, at any given time, some amount, some proportion of the flow in that river is not from naturally occurring rainfall, but it's from discharges of return flows into the river. This has been going on for a very long time. As long as we've been using water at a kind of a municipal level, we've had these return flow discharges. And so, another component of our System Operation Permit was to recognize that these flows do create reliable supplies of water. They're reliable because they're always there as long as we use water, and we're not going to stop using water, so we're not going to stop discharging the return flows back in the river. So, the System Operation Permit also authorizes the use of return flow discharge volumes from a suite of wastewater treatment plants. Not all of them, but ones that are actually designated in the permit at specific volumes. And that's a third component of supply. The unique thing about the return flows in SysOps is they are listed separately. The additional supply made available from what we've been discussing previously as system operations is listed, and then return flows are kind of specified individually. Like, on top of that, here's return flows.
Charlie L Shugart: So, there are certain wastewater treatment plants? Or are we is it that detailed within this SysOps Permit?
Peyton Lisenby: Yes. It is. Yeah. Certain plants at certain locations.
Charlie L Shugart: So, I imagine that changes over time in terms of how many wastewater treatment plants there are, and or, you know, if they grow or anything. So does that affect the permit? Do we have to make changes or amendments?
Peyton Lisenby: Yeah. So, I mean, life is messy. Growth is always happening, and so wastewater treatment plants may expand, and that's very common for them to get bigger. As we use more water, they need more capacity to treat the more water to be able to maintain the standard to which they treat it. New plants are brought online all the time. Old plants are either decommissioned or maybe they're moved to a different plant, or pipes are constantly being rerouted, and things like that. So yes. The short answer is yes. Over time, accumulations to how these wastewater treatment plant discharges have changed over time certainly do happen. And to that end, we have an obligation based on a special condition in our System Operation Permit to update the information that's in the permit at a minimum of every ten years.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay. Yeah.
Peyton Lisenby: And that's one of the things that we update is all the wastewater treatment plant information.
Charlie L Shugart: Using the set of reservoirs as a system, using the naturally occurring flows, basically, how much water is already in the river, and then using the return flows from the wastewater treatment plants, taking that additional water, are there any environmental protections in our permit?
Peyton Lisenby: Short answer is yes.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay.
Peyton Lisenby: So, at the time we were applying for the SysOps Permit, in parallel, the state was undergoing an adoption of what they call environmental flow standards. There was some legislation that instituted a process by which some science would be done to understand what flow conditions in the rivers might need to be, or what, you know, what ecological conditions could benefit from certain flows. And so that process ultimately culminated in the adoption of a suite of flow standards, which means a rate of flow for specific locations, usually USGS gage locations, because you can actually measure the flow to see if the standards are met, at multiple locations in the basin for different seasons. Right? So, imagine during the spring, you could expect flows to be a little higher, maybe than in the summer. So, these standards, once they were developed, were applied into the System Operation Permit so that the use of our System Operation Permit water wouldn't impact the attainment or the maintenance of those environmental flow standards at those locations at those different times. So, it's one of the things we, on our end, we have to manage appropriately when we use SysOps. We have to ensure that our use doesn't affect the attainment of those e-flow standards.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. Okay.
Aaron Abel: And doesn't affect downstream senior water right holders. And the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Brazos Watermaster program, we submit, you know, I think we talked about that in a previous podcast. You know, we submit information to them to make sure that hey, you know, our customer needs to divert water and we want them to divert it under, the System Operation Permit, TCEQ Watermaster has to okay that, and make sure that all those environmental flow criteria are met and all the downstream senior water right holders are being met before those diversions can occur.
Peyton Lisenby: Because of when we had to apply for SysOps, right, we had to wait a long time for the models to be sophisticated enough to meet this permitting standard. So, our System Operation Permit has a very junior priority date. And I know you've already had a kind of water rights podcast. So, you know, priority dates are important. Right? It's not just about the volume. It's not about how much. It's not about where, but also it's about priority, where you are in line. And so, SysOps is what we call a very junior water right. So, it's right to divert water is way at the back of the line. Some of the more senior rights even go back to, like, the 19 teens.
Charlie L Shugart: Oh, wow.
Peyton Lisenby. Yeah. So, the more senior rights are obviously first. First in time, first in right to divert. We do have a new supply of water made available from SysOps. However, it's at a very junior priority date.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. So, we haven't mentioned this. With this new permit, how much more water did that end up providing us?
Aaron Abel: So, from a long term contract perspective we contract on firm supply and we wanna make sure that new contracts, new diversions that we enter into, we can deliver that water or the water is present 100% of the time throughout the period of record. So, we talked about the WRAP and WAM. You know, we use the hydrology, evaporation, inflows, diversions of other water rights, and a model to make sure that the contracts that we enter are firm. And so we did that analysis, incorporating the new authorization of the System Operation Permit, and we've actually entered into about 100,000 acre-feet of new contracts, which occurred in the 2018-2019 time period.
Charlie L Shugart: For people who aren't familiar with, like, acre feet, how much water is 100,000-acre feet of water?
Aaron Abel: Oh, yeah. So, Possum Kingdom Reservoir is BRA’s largest reservoir. It holds 540,000 acre feet of water. The firm yield, so what PK can individually supply, through the period of record, through the most critical drought period, is about 160,000-acre feet per year. So, it was a significant increase in long-term water supply for the basin. And we didn't have to do it, and you mentioned this, we didn't have to do it by building anything. You know, it was a lot of time and a lot of analysis, both from a technical perspective and, you know, regulatory perspective, but,
Peyton Lisenby: Ultimately, we built it with math.
Charlie L Shugart: That's incredible. I mean, that's incredible is what that is. Wow. So, besides the actual SysOps Permit itself, I know we talked about the different parts of it that makes up of it that kind of calculates the water, and then we have the environmental flow portion of it. Are there other documentation that supports this water right permit?
Peyton Lisenby: Yeah. So, the SysOps Permit itself is the water right. It's the actual document that's issued by TCEQ. However, in connection with that, there is something called our Water Management Plan. Now, because of how complex the SysOps Permit is, it's really impossible to convey all of that complexity in a water right permit. A water right permit is there to lay out certain procedural things, but it's not gonna give you all the gory details of how those things work with one another. That's what the Water Management Plan is for. With our SysOps Permit, we also have an accompanying Water Management Plan that is part of the permit. And in relation to our Water Management Plan, we have what we call a Technical Report that supports the Water Management Plan. It provides more quantitative contextual information to go along with the language that's in the Water Management Plan itself. And the Technical Report is obviously a much more beefy document because it has a lot more explanatory language in there. The Water Management Plan is kind of the highlights of the operating principles we use to ensure we comply with our SysOps Permit when we use our SysOps water.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay.
Peyton Lisenby: The Technical Report itself has numerous appendices at the end of it, and these appendices kinda lay out the reference information analysis on lake level, it presents our Drought Contingency Plan and our Water Conservation Plan. It lists all other water rights. There's a lot of just kinda eat-your-vegetables-style information that's there in the appendices that kinda give all the supporting information for how we got there. Most notably, one of the appendices is our Water Accounting Plan. And that is something that came about, as Aaron mentioned, because the SysOps Permit is so complex and because it relates to so many other things in the basin. You have reservoirs, you have run-of-river flows, you have return flows, and you have environmental flow standards. How do you keep up with what you’re doing? And how do you keep up to ensure that you are using your water in accordance with the terms of the permit? That's what the accounting plan does. So, BRA, we maintain that accounting plan. As Aaron mentioned, we are constant coordination with the watermaster in updating and sharing that accounting plan. So, we, on a weekly basis, can understand how we're using the permit.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. That's a lot. So, you mentioned earlier that well, I think we talked about it because of all the wastewater treatment plants that the SysOps Permit itself is updated every couple or however many years.
Peyton Lisenby: A minimum of every ten years.
Charlie L Shugart: Every ten years.
Peyton Lisenby: Yeah.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay.
Peyton Lisenby: We keep going back to the complexity of the permit. As we go through time and water demands increase, I like to say all the easy water is gone. All that's left is the complicated water. And that's okay because we're in a position to take advantage of it. But because of all the intricacies of the SysOps Permit, it's dependent on a lot of factors that change over time. We just talked about earlier where our wastewater treatment plants might change over time as urban areas grow and new plants come online. Well, we also get additional data as well. The period of record grows. Other system elements, new infrastructure, the WAM itself, as time goes on, you know, the WAMs have to incorporate more water rights and changes to water rights. So, all of those changes mean that at some point, we have to have a kind of an accounting of what's changed and an update to the terms that are in the information that's in the permit and the Water Management Plan. So that's the point of the Water Management Plan update. It goes through all the details that are related to our SysOps authorization and updates those details that need to be updated that have changed, and then represents the permit back to TCEQ for approval.
Charlie L Shugart: When is the next time that we have to go through that process?
Peyton Lisenby: So, the clock started when we were issued the permit from TCEQ. So BRA was issued the SysOps Permit on Nov. 30, 2016. So, Nov. 30, this year, 2026, is when the first update to the Water Management Plan is due back to TCEQ, and we are in the throes of it now.
Charlie L Shugart: That's a lot of information. How do you go about updating a plan like this?
Peyton Lisenby: One bite at a time. Right? So obviously, we start well ahead of the deadline. This is a process that does take time. Numerous datasets, customer demands, and the Water Availability Models, infrastructure, all the things we've talked about before, all have to be updated. Obviously, BRA, we house a lot of this data, especially regarding our customer use and customer demands, but at the same time, and for the sake of efficiency, we also hire professional engineering firm to come in here and do some of the technical lifting with us so we can get the really, the Water Availability Models done just right so that they're updated the right way to support the Water Management Plan update. These Water Availability models are big. I mean, they're thousands of records long, and so, obviously, it's a huge lift for BRA staff. And so, we certainly want professional engineering firms to come in here and give us an assist with that.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. Absolutely. That's a big deal. What's out there that people could take a look at if they wanted to get into the nitty-gritty of everything?
Peyton Lisenby: For some time now, we've had on the BRA website kind of web page kind of dedicated to explaining what SysOps is, but also showing all the documentation associated with it. And as I said, there's a lot. Right? There's the permit. There's the Water Management Plan. There's the Technical Report. There are the appendices. There's the accounting plan. We've recently updated the website, given it a fresh face, but hopefully also made it a bit easier to navigate as well. But we're also in anticipation of the update, we wanted to revise the website so that it could accommodate additional information about the process of our Water Management Plan update. So right now, on BRA's website, you go to brazos.org, and from there, you can link to our system operation kinda landing page just for our System Operation Permit. We have a link for that kinda just lays out all the documentation, which you can link to and download. A link for frequently asked questions, because there are many frequently asked questions. That lays out some of the basics, some of the stuff we've covered here today. And then also a timeline. We mentioned before the timeline's a bit long, and so we've got kind of the key dates since we applied for the permit back in 2004, all the way up till now, of what the highlights were of the application process and when we were actually issued the permit.
Charlie L Shugart: Do we have to go through this process with our other water rights permits?
Peyton Lisenby: No.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay.
Peyton Lisenby: No. Now, BRA already had our other reservoir rights, and we still do. Those rights are still there. They still stand on their own. However, the way we integrate them into our system operation is described in our Water Management Plan, but that doesn't mean that our Water Management Plan is connected to reauthorizing our existing reservoir rights. Our reservoir rights are their own standalone water rights, but system operations do obviously integrate them together in a way that is represented by our System Operation Permit, and that's what's being updated every ten years.
Charlie L Shugart: That makes sense. So, do any other of the river authorities have a WMP?
Peyton Lisenby: At the moment, the Brazos River Authority and the Lower Colorado River Authority are the only river authorities that have Water Management Plans. Now that being said, they're very different. Obviously, our Water Management Plan came about through our System Operation Permit application, so it's directly related to the use of our System Operation Permit water. The LCRA, the Lower Colorado River Authority's Water Management Plan, is different. It's been around a lot longer, and presents their operating principles of how they manage their system. But it also is used to determine availability, and that's a key difference. Their Water Management Plan is used and updated to determine the availability of water downstream, whereas our Water Management Plan, the availability of water is based on the water rights.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay. So, this is incredible. Literally created this huge amount of water via math. Amazing. Just amazing. If you are listening at home and you have any additional questions, please reach out. Our email address is information@Brazos.org. We can help you out, and I will put a link to the SysOps page that Peyton talked about in the description, so you have a way to get right to it. So, other than that, I thank you guys for coming back and talking with me again. For everyone listening at home, that's a wrap. Thanks for listening to Unpacking the Brazos River.