114 Business View - February 2016
cations, business and health services, and education.
Angelo State University, founded in 1928, is one of the
nation’s premier, regional universities.
While San Angelo is blessed with a vibrant business
environment, like many American cities of comparable
size and age, it also faces many challenges in keeping
its infrastructure intact and operable for the benefit of
its citizens and corporate residents. The responsibility
for that task is, naturally, in the hands of San Angelo’s
city government, and most especially in those of the
engineers, department heads, directors, and workers
of the city’s various public works divisions and depart-
ments.
Bill Riley is the Director of Water Utilities for San An-
gelo. He oversees the eight divisions that make up the
city’s water department. His mandate includes produc-
ing high-quality drinking water for the city’s residents
and businesses. He talks about recent events and how
his department is meeting its current challenges:
“Texas, for the last couple of years, has had a pretty se-
vere drought,” he begins. “This year, most of Texas was
able to come out of that drought with about 85 percent
of our reservoirs filling up. San Angelo has, historically,
relied solely on surface water supplies that have been
dwindling for some time. This year, even during the
rain, very little has changed in the reservoirs San An-
gelo relies on. They are less than 13-percent capacity,
still.”
Riley relates that the city initiated a $120 million
groundwater development project back in 2010, and
now that it is completed, it is capable of yielding about
8 million gallons a day of groundwater for the city.
“Unfortunately,” he says, “that won’t meet the city’s
daily demand if the surface water supplies continue to
decline. So we’re continuing to explore additional wa-
ter resources, both in the short term and for the long
term.”
Riley continues: “One of the projects the city is explor-
INFRASTRUCTURE
