Long day at City Hall ends with continued debate over Inner Harbor desal project

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Good evening everyone. I'm Leslie Adami.

[00:00:02]>> I'm Mike Gillespie. It has been a long day and now night at Corpus Christi City Hall where a marathon City Council meeting continues.

[00:00:11]>> Yeah, it began early this morning with the pre-trial hearing to remove the mayor. Later, 5 hours of public comment and then a report from the far field study group.

[00:00:19]>> Now, still on the agenda as of now, a vote on whether to move forward with the inner harbor desal plant.

[00:00:26]>> Our Michael Gibson has been following every twist and turn of today's City Council meeting and is still there tonight. He joins us live with this report. Michael.

[00:00:39]>> They're still going on and basically why that happened is uh they had a basically a 5-hour public comment session that took place. Over 100 people signed up to speak during public comment and uh it just really extended this meeting into the time we're at right now. Right now, they're actually discussing the far field study that the city uh paid for to try and determine if uh the bays were going to be affected in any way by the uh extra salinity coming from the inner harbor desalination brine discharge or if it was going to change the temperature in the bay. And uh the far field study uh group uh said that that would not happen, but then one of the far field study committee members uh who is a UTMSI scientist uh said that she had a group of 13 local PhD level scientists who say that uh they're not sure that this project should move forward with this uh with this study because they don't think enough was done to ensure that the bay would not be harmed.

[00:01:49]But anyway, we did speak with some of the city councilmen tonight in between the last break they had before they tackled the far field study. And here's what some of them said about the farfield study and the inner harbor desalination controversy.

[00:02:04]>> The The challenge is that um the the the challenge with delaying is that there's a certain time constraint with which we need to ask for an extension from the Texas Water Development Board.

[00:02:15]So, if we don't have a project uh for the Texas Water Development Board, then we go into defeasement of the 250 million. And then in addition, we lose the other we lose our place in line for the other 500 million. If we move forward today, then we're out 70 million. If we don't, then it could cost us 240 million.

[00:02:37]>> Well, let me just tell you, desal is going to take 3 to 5 years. So, we've got a little bit of time. We have water that we haven't even counted yet because it's came down, it's not in our plan.

[00:02:45]And I wish that we had waited for the desal until we got those numbers. So, and Evangeline's going to come online.

[00:02:52]It's going to. You just wait and see.

[00:02:53]Mark my words, we're going to get that water.

[00:02:55]>> My wife says, "Don't let the perfect get in the way of the doable." Right? And I think there's this energy about looking for the perfect. I think this is doable, and I don't think it negatively impacts the bay.

[00:03:09]>> and reverse osmosis systems >> those three city council people. And uh the debate is still going on on that farfield study. Then after that, they're scheduled to vote on the inner harbor desalination project to move it to 60% design build. Uh but anyway, they may take the vote tonight. I had spoken with some of the city council members yesterday. They thought they might delay this vote tonight because of having to digest all that information about the farfield study and the controversies about it, and different scientists having different opinions. So, they could push that forward to the next meeting. But we're not exactly sure that's going to happen, but we will keep Keep updated. And of course, tonight, if anything happens and then of course in three news first edition in the morning we'll have the latest on this issue and if they actually took a vote or not.

[00:03:59]Back to studios.