AUSTIN, Texas — Increased boil water notices and billions of gallons of water lost every year are just two reasons why Texas didn’t fare well in its infrastructure report card again.
On Tuesday, the Texas Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers released its 2025 Texas Infrastructure Report at the Capitol.
The report evaluated 16 categories: aviation, bridges, broadband, dams, drinking water, energy, hazardous waste, levees, ports, public parks, rail, roads, solid waste, stormwater, transit, and wastewater. Overall, the group gave Texas a C.
Meanwhile, the group gave Texas a D+ and D- for the drinking water and wastewater sectors, respectively. In 2021, drinking water received a grade of C- and wastewater received a grade of D.
The 2025 report points to data from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that shows boil water advisories doubled from 1,708 in 2020 to 3,578 in 2023. The most recent state data shows Austin Water lost 7.1 billion gallons of water in 2023, or enough water to fill up Lake Austin.
How did the state’s wastewater sector fare?
While grading the wastewater sector, the group pointed to a lack of funding and staffing. The KVUE Defenders investigated the industry’s labor shortage in 2023 and 2024, highlighting the looming labor shortage and what’s being done to mitigate it.
American Society of Civil Engineers members said the state’s outdated wastewater systems are not equipped to handle extreme weather, leading to sewer leaks and overflows.
“Outdated sewer lines designed before our modern understanding of more extreme precipitation events have resulted in combined sewer overflows where heavy rainfalls overwhelm pipelines, causing untreated stormwater and wastewater to overflow and discharge directly into nearby streams,” Austin Messerli, the Texas Infrastructure Report Card Committee Co-Chair, said. “These overflows led to contamination of roughly 470 rivers in Texas and several other of the state’s beaches.”
How did the state’s energy sector fare?
The group of civil engineers gave the state’s energy sector a C grade.
The report showed that the energy sector faces many challenges complicated by lagging regulation, market uncertainty and unprecedented demand growth from industries like data centers.
In February, the KVUE Defenders investigated how the expansion of data centers strained the state’s power and water supplies. The group made several recommendations in its report.
“The maintenance and modernization of Texas’ infrastructure remains vital to the economy, public health, safety, and security,” the report stated. “However, many infrastructure systems are underfunded, nearing the end of their lifespan, and must be modernized to adapt to Texas’ rapid population growth and increasingly frequent and varied severe weather events.”
According to the report, since Texans pay for those systems through taxes and user fees, the group recommended decisions about infrastructure should be made based on long-term comprehensive planning with sustainable and reliable funding. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick both made water a top priority for the 89th session of the Texas Legislature.
In January, Patrick announced Senate Bill 7, legislation that would increase investments in Texas’ water supply. Then in February, Abbott announced a “Texas-size investment in water” and said he would work with lawmakers to “make the one-time largest investment in water in Texas history.”
Abbott added that Texas would “dedicate $1 billion a year for 10 years to tap into new water supplies and repair existing pipes to save billions of gallons of water each year.”
The state will also invest in new water supply strategies that “develop resources like desalination and move water from areas of abundance to areas of need; invest in existing programs to ensure rural communities throughout Texas have the necessary resources to maintain existing water supply systems; and create a long-term dedicated funding stream to invest in critical water infrastructure for future generations of Texans to have a reliable water supply.”
You can view the full report card below: