How-To Guide: Part Two
State Case Studies
Learn about state-specific efforts to develop water service area boundaries.
As of December 2022, eighteen states publicly share service area boundary data that they have collected for a plethora of uses. Other states may have a smaller subset of service area boundary data available to the public, full datasets that are not publicly available, or lack a centralized repository of service area boundaries.
The agencies involved, the funding sources leveraged, and the policies used for both gathering and using service area boundary data vary from state to state. They present a spectrum of options that could be adopted and adapted by other states hoping to produce and use service area boundary data.
551 systems serving 3.3 million people
Utah’s Division of Water Resources published their service boundary data in 2020, though the data development effort began years earlier.
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The dataset began as only point locations of water systems and was informally expanded to service area boundaries when the agency realized the need for estimating population projections and future water supply and demand. As seen in many other states, when DWR staff started requesting service area boundaries from water systems, many complied with little pushback. DWR’s work was possible due to cross-agencies partnership - DWR's sister agency, the Division of Water Rights, physically visits approximately 60 systems each year and requests map updates during these visits. Utah’s geographic information work is also uniquely fortified by Utah’s geography division, created by legislation in the 1980’s.
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This data has largely been used internally by DWR and Water Rights, but these agencies receive frequent inquiries from researchers and graduate students to better understand and use the data. There is also an educational public service value to all the geographic data developed by state agencies, and Utah does a particularly good job at publishing all sorts of data for public use.
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Supporting the service area boundary work requires anywhere between $50-100k a year, which DWR thinks is likely done more efficiently within the government rather than through an independent contractor.
3,050 systems serving 39.8 million people
California’s efforts to develop their service area boundaries formally began with the creation of the Water Boundary Tool by Tracking California in 2012.
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The tool was initially funded by a grant from the CDC National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program, and the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) and the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) funded subsequent development of the tool and continued gathering of data to support California’s declaration of the human right to water.
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The service area boundary data are regularly used to connect addresses to water systems for excessive watering reports and in grant eligibility determinations. The boundary data are also instrumental in supporting the human right to water for regionalization studies and in the first of its kind statewide needs assessment in 2020-21 to determine the feasibility of different solutions for struggling water systems.
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During a three year period under an OEHHA and CDPH interagency agreement, the tool maintenance and data collection budget averaged $131k per year.
632 systems serving 2.1 million people
New Mexico’s Office of the State Engineer developed their service area boundaries using a Water-Use Data and Research grant from the US Geological Survey in 2019.
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Using a private consulting firm named HydroAnalytics, it took roughly $90,000 and one year to collect, digitize, and standardize the service area boundary data for 600 of New Mexico’s 625 community water systems. That’s an average of $150 per system.
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This data, which was collected using direct outreach to systems and through the comparison of water rights maps to google maps, was published as a work in progress and includes information about the relative data quality of each boundary.
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The service area boundaries have been used for a myriad of purposes including estimating domestic well use, assessing which water systems could benefit from a desalination plant, and the Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment to assess erosion risk, post-fire debris flow, resilience to climate change, and systems only relying on surface water amongst others. They will soon be used for the water use planning assessments that motivated their development in the first place.
1,981 systems serving 9 million people
North Carolina is still in the process of improving the quality of their service area boundary data for publication and use by the state.
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After the 2007-08 drought, North Carolina adopted legislation to better understand water use throughout the state and improve planning for future drought scenarios. The legislation specified that water systems with more than 1,000 connections or serving more 3,300 people needed to provide more water use information to the Department of Environmental Quality. The Department of Environmental Quality requested service area boundary maps, and roughly 90% of systems made an effort to provide maps when requested. The collected maps were scanned when necessary and stored until 2018, and then Duke University - with its own external funding - turned the images into interactive GIS files.
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Department of Environmental Quality representatives recommended working with other agencies or divisions when tackling such a project, despite the difficulties of interagency collaboration. Such collaborations can help avoid duplicative work and sometimes find additional funding sources for data development.
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Though the North Carolina dataset is still in development, it will be used for water supply and population projections, emergency planning and notifications, and to better identify areas served by domestic wells or with water quality issues that need further state investment.