HOUSTON \u2014 All\u00a0eyes are on the South Texas city of Corpus Christi as it works to figure out what\u2019s next for its water supply.<\/p>\n
After years as the chief operating officer in Corpus Christi, Drew Molly is now the City of Houston\u2019s very first chief water officer.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is really unprecedented, which is frankly why there\u2019s a lot of attention on the situation,\u201d said Molly.<\/p>\n
The situation Molly is talking about is what\u2019s going on in Corpus Christi. The city is experiencing a severe shortage of water\u00a0\u2014 a shortage that Drew saw coming.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was really tasked with trying to bring in a new water supply for the City of Corpus Christi,\u201d said Molly.<\/p>\n
He was the chief operating officer of Corpus Christi from 2022 through September 2025.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been talking about desalination in Texas for many years. Desalination is a project that had been on the books in Corpus Christi for 10 years. My role when I came into the City of Corpus Christi was to essentially continue to move the momentum forward of developing a big desalination project,\u201d said Molly.<\/p>\n
He said city officials there couldn\u2019t quite come to a decision, leaving them in the spot they are now.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey hit a pause. They hit a pause on the project, and it\u2019s unfortunate because we all know that Corpus Christi is struggling right now with sustainable water supplies,\u201d said Molly.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a sense of urgency that Molly says is the most important takeaway from his former job, and one he hopes to create in his new role. He\u2019s now taken on the responsibility of supplying water to the nation\u2019s fourth largest city.<\/p>\n
\u201cHouston, like many other cities in the country, has aging infrastructure, so there is a very large sense of urgency that we have on our team to continue to invest in that infrastructure and ensure that the infrastructure is being replaced as quickly as we can replace it,\u201d said Molly.<\/p>\n
Just this week, the environmental organization The Sierra Club released a new study that shows Texas is at a crucial point for deciding about its water use. They called on Texas leaders and owners of power plants to do more to conserve water. They said the use of water by those plants is \u201cstaggering.\u201d The group also says the situation in Corpus Christi is a wake-up call.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has made us acutely aware that water scarcity in the state is not taken seriously enough,\u201d said Linsay Mader.<\/p>\n
Molly said that\u2019s why resources are being put into cities like Houston.<\/p>\n
\u201cHouston has a $4 billion water treatment plant expansion project. It may be one of the largest water treatment plant expansion projects going on in the world today,\u201d said Molly.<\/p>\n
Molly said he would continue to put the community first and make sure nothing like what\u2019s happening in South Texas happens in Houston.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HOUSTON \u2014 All\u00a0eyes are on the South Texas city of Corpus Christi as it works to figure out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":212297,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[2160,132,155,157,156,1570,102,138,56,101440,6716,223,82,27,1569,2053,835],"class_list":["post-284709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-corpus-christi","tag-app-top-stories","tag-austin","tag-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi-headlines","tag-corpus-christi-news","tag-ctv","tag-dallas","tag-el-paso","tag-houston","tag-houston-what-you-need-to-know","tag-lauren-kendrick","tag-news","tag-san-antonio","tag-texas","tag-texas-what-you-need-to-know","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/212297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}