Piedmont residents say their faucets already tell a grim story. Every three to four weeks, neighbors report noticeable drops in water pressure, and some homes briefly lose service altogether, according to residents and city officials. City staff have mapped out a multi-million dollar fix for the aging system, but most of that work is still on the drawing board. With a proposed data center now tied to a rezoning request, water capacity has turned into a headline fight at City Hall.
According to KFOR, Piedmont bought more than 200 million gallons of treated water from Oklahoma City in 2024. To help the town catch up, the Oklahoma Water Resources Board signed off on a $22,650,000 low-interest Financial Assistance Program loan and later awarded a $2,000,000 PREP grant to start right-sizing the network, according to separate releases from the Oklahoma Water Resources Board and the Oklahoma Water Resources Board.
Planned Fixes, Budgets And Timelines
City documents split the overhaul into several major projects. Plans call for a secondary Oklahoma City connection with a booster pump and about two miles of 16-inch water main, a new 1-million-gallon elevated storage tank, rehabilitation or redrilling of existing wells, installation of flow meters and evaluations of the sanitary sewer system.
The council packet lists the Oklahoma City connection at about $4.3 million and the new storage tank at roughly $2.9 million. Many of the projects are still listed at only 30 to 60 percent design in city presentations, which means residents are staring at years of work while dealing with problems right now.
Data Center Fight Reaches City Hall
That uncertainty is feeding pushback on a proposed Beltline Planned Unit Development tied to a data center project. At a recent council meeting, residents urged officials to pull the rezoning from consideration until the city can prove the system can handle it.
City staff told council members they reviewed a data center in Georgia that used about 7,500 to 10,000 gallons of water per day for cooling, landscaping, plumbing and fire protection. Locals argued that kind of extra demand on a fragile system is asking for trouble.
"Adding a data center will absolutely decimate what little water pressure we already have," resident Chelsea Bingham said, according to KOCO. Another speaker asked the council to remove the rezoning from the planning and zoning commission agenda set for Monday.
State lawmakers and regulators are not exactly disagreeing about the system’s condition, even if they are preaching patience on the fixes. Sen. Kristen Thompson told KFOR that the city’s infrastructure is "so outdated they are really struggling to keep up with the growth," and both the OWRB releases and city presentations emphasize that hydraulic modeling, flow-meter installations and property work have to come before major construction can begin.
Next up is the planning and zoning commission’s Monday session on the rezoning request, which will test whether officials insist on clear, demonstrable capacity improvements before signing off on any heavy water users. Even with state loans and grants already approved, residents say they want firm timelines and hard guarantees on water capacity before a new industrial load is allowed on the line.
