Policy-driven water sector and energy dependencies in Texas border colonias

Colonias— a subset of peri-urban subdivisions located in the United States — often lack ease of access to critical infrastructure services, such as water, wastewater, or energy, consequentially cascading into public health challenges and reduced community well-being. This challenge has been tackled globally through differing policy approaches (dependent on location) in attempt to improve the access to such services and the built environment standards existing in these communities. One category of such policy efforts deemed relatively successful is “In-Place Upgrading”, requiring local participation of the community residents. In Texas colonias, a statewide law was enacted in 1995 to encourage in-place upgrading. This law, leveraging the prioritization of energy infrastructure in households above other infrastructure services, introduced a logical dependency into communities that required residents—prior to connecting to electricity or gas—to have their platted land registered with the city/county and then connected to adequate water and wastewater services. This study seeks to assess the relationship between built environment parameters associated with water and wastewater access, and thereby impacting energy access, approximately two decades after the law has been introduced, as well as the perceived burden and efficacy of this particular law on boarder colonia residents. Enabled by publically available data from the Attorney General of Texas Office and semi-structured interviews from state decision makers and promotoras (local community volunteers), hypothesis testing and qualitative methods are used to answer and understand the aforementioned objectives. Three counties—Hidalgo, El Paso, and Cameron—representing 1,297 colonias were used in this analysis. The results revealed that among 110 combinations of parameters exploring colonias access to services and built environment, only one associated pair—colonia incorporation into a city and the presence of a community water system—was present in all three counties. However, many other associated parameters were significance in only one county, indicating the heterogeneity present at the community level when evaluating parameters possibly influencing access to built environment services. Findings from this study suggest decision makers—in addition to those policies and laws in place— focus on localized county/city-level efforts tailored to the community to increase access and improve the built environment.