Water providers say additional water supply is needed to meet demand in southwest Mo. - KY3

Water providers say additional water supply is needed to meet demand in southwest Mo.

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (KY3) - Southwest Missouri Water (SWMO Water) and Missouri State University are holding the 13th Annual Water Conference called “Trends That Matter.” It’s happening on Tuesday at the Darr Agricultural Center on 2401 South Kansas Expressway.

Tri-State Water Resource Coalition and the Southwest Missouri Joint Municipal Water Utility Commission comprise SWMO Water. Members are communities, water providers, and utilities from across southwest Missouri working together to ensure adequate and affordable long-term water supply for people in all 16 counties of SWMO.

Roddy Rogers is the executive director for SWMO Water. Rogers said holding conferences like the one on Tuesday is vital to ensuring the future of water supply in our area is strong.

“It’s kind of like if you’ve got a 100-mile trip and you’ve got 30 miles of gas, at 30 miles out, you better be at the gas station, and you can’t start driving around at 15 looking for it, or the trips over. The trip we’re talking about here is lives,” Rogers said. “Some might have only five or ten miles of gas. We’ve got to be ahead of it because you can’t wait until you need it, and if a drought happens, you really have to have it then. You can’t implement something like this overnight.”

Rogers said identified water needs in the future will exceed current supplies by 53 million gallons per day. Stockton Lake was identified as a solution that helps address about half of these future water supply needs. Rogers said Stockton Lake will be studied to ensure adequate and affordable long-term water supply for over 850,000 people.

“Building new dams and reservoirs - there haven’t been any dams or reservoirs built for a long time since there’s a huge environmental impact to that,” Rogers said. “It floods people’s land, and if there are lakes that are already built, it just seems to make sense to use that water if it can be made available rather than build new lakes and make that environmental impact more severe.”

The conference starts around 8:30 a.m. It will last until 4:45 p.m. on Tuesday.

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