10/13/2026
If you saw the KSWO news piece about our petitioning the County Commissioners for a change in our official name or authorities, here is a clarification of what is happening:
Rural Water District No 5, Comanche County, dba Pecan Valley RWD, was formed in 2021 to replace the defunct Pecan Valley Waterworks, making the water distribution and sewage collection/treatment a county/state level govt entity owned by all the homeowners in the Pecan Valley addition which includes Pecan Valley North, Pecan Valley South, and Shelter Lakes.
Pecan Valley RWD was established under OK Statute §82-1324.34. Order constituting rural water districts. Districts are established by the County under the Rural Water, Sewer, Gas and Solid Waste Management Districts Act. We have been both a water and a sewer system since our inception, but due to a scrivener's error "Sewer" was left out of our name when we were established. That had never posed a problem until this summer when an application for Federal funding through Oklahoma's Clean Water State Revolving Fund, CWSRF, was held up due to us not having the word "sewer" in our official name or on the Commissioners' original creating document. What we are now doing is simply a procedural issue to correct an omission in 2021.
Pecan Valley’s sewer system has had a Dept of Environmental Quality Consent Order against it for over 20 years (many sewer systems across the state do, as these are the DEQ's mandates for bringing sewer systems into compliance with regulatory standards.) The Pecan Valley RWD has made great strides in addressing the requirements of this Consent Order, but one significant problem remains and, in order to address that problem, we had applied for the funding through the CWSRF.
No one in Pecan Valley will even notice the change, this won't alter service but will only impact regulatory compliance.
300 of the nearly 600 homes in the Pecan Valley RWD are on our sewer; the other homes each have their own septic system. Only those who are connected to the District's sewer system pay anything for the sewer system; it is a separate line item on their bills. Those with septic systems do not receive this charge and we are careful with our accounting and management to ensure that the sewage system has no financial impact on those who are not on it. i.e. Water Rates DO NOT subsidize the sewer system, it is funded entirely by the sewer fees charged to those residents who are connected to it.
Neither this project nor the funding application will impact rates for Pecan Valley RWD. The City of Lawton has nothing to do with our sewer system nor our sewer rates. The City of Lawton did raise the water rate for Outside Wholesalers (several RWDs and Water Associations) by nearly 50% this past summer when they raised their Lawton residential rates by 15%. We did increase our rates per thousand gallons by exactly the amount Lawton raised the rate we pay them for the water.
