The City Borrowed and Spent $1 Billion Based on Fake Numbers
- Sam Aly
- Oct 19
- 13 min read
Pflugerville’s entire billion-dollar water and wastewater spending spree is built on completely fake population numbers.
The U.S. Census says our population has been flat since 2020, hovering around 66k people. The city, meanwhile, has been claiming 80-90k residents today and projecting 137K by 2030 which is a fantasy with no basis in any real data.
Those false numbers were used to justify:
•A $1 billion water and wastewater build-out,
•A $230 million downtown project, and
•A total of $2.2 billion in new city debt which is double what any nearby city is spending.
Our existing water plant and wells can already supply 23 million gallons a day, enough for 85–100k people. We are years away from needing more.
Instead of waiting or adding a low-cost potable water-reuse expansion that would have extended our supply for another decade for a few tens of millions, the city jumped straight to a $300 million expansion, pushing capacity to 36 million gallons a day, enough water for 185 thousand people who don’t exist.
Every bit of that debt is being paid from your utility bills right now.
Rates are rising because we’re financing infrastructure for a city that’s not here, and may never come.
_____________________________________________________
As per my last video, I was going to release a detailed video showing the calculations that the city badly miscalculated growth projections and wasted hundreds of millions of dollars. While editing that video, I realized it would be far easier for you to get the data written out, allowing you to easily click links and skip to relevant sections to double-check the math and assumptions. So here that is. I apologize for the length, but it’s important and I want to make sure all details are included. If this is accurate, it is a city-devastating level of mistake or fraud that cost us a billion dollars and counting. I will try to make this as easy to follow as possible. Happy to answer any questions I can; I know there are certainly a few the city needs to answer. I will put all the links at the bottom and reference them throughout.
There are 3 components to this:
•Population growth estimates
•Wastewater capacity and infrastructure
•Water capacity and infrastructure
As a functioning city we need enough water and wastewater capacity to handle our current population at all times. We also need to have enough to handle projected growth. Otherwise the taps run dry and the toilet doesn’t flush… bad things. However, water and wastewater infrastructure is very expensive. It’s normally paid for with bonds, long-term debt that we pay regular payments on, the same as if you were to finance a car for your household.
Comparing capacity to current demand is easy enough: those are both observable numbers, and as long as we have more water than we use, all is good. But it also takes time to build out this infrastructure, so we need to be planning for our needs 10 years out or so. To do that we need to know what the city population will be then and beyond so that we know the new infrastructure will be enough in the future. Therefore, accurate city growth projections are vitally important. Too low and we run into shortages of water, but too HIGH and we pay for a system far too large for the population.
A quick example: If 100 people have to pay $1,000 for a dinner that serves 100, they can spend $10 each. But if 10 people agree to pay that $1,000 because they’re expecting 100 people to show up and nobody else does, then they get 100 servings of food when they only can consume 10, AND they each have to pay $100. Waste.
The City of Pflugerville recently committed to paying almost $1 billion for new wastewater and water infrastructure. They also spent what will likely be around $230 million for the Downtown East project and committed to a total spend of $2.2 billion [1], borrowed, of course. This is DOUBLE what our highest-spending neighbor has in their capital improvement plan. This is all in anticipation of having to service a certain future population number. It’s paid for by the current population. If those hypothetical people were miscalculated or never show up for whatever reason, the loans and buildings don’t go away; they just get paid for, for decades, by far fewer people than projected (us, the current residents), and we end up with excess water, wastewater processing, and City Hall space we can’t use.
------THE CITY’S POPULATION NUMBERS------
The city has seen significant growth over the years. Looking at hard, actual numbers from the U.S. Census [2] we had:
2000: 16,335 Residents
2010: 46,936 Residents (+3,060/yr average)
2020: 65,191 Residents (+1,826/yr average)
Massive initial growth, slowing as the city has gotten larger. Nothing surprising there. It does give us a recent baseline because we KNOW that in 2020 we had 65,191 citizens.
So how many do we have now in 2025? Well, it depends on who you ask. Estimates vary from the normal to the ridiculous.
The safe, reliable answer is to go back to the U.S. Census because their entire job is to calculate and forecast that. Here’s what they have:
2020: 65,191 [2]
2021: 66,494 [3]
2022: 65,604 [3]
2023: 65,301 [4]
2024: 66,819 [5]
An increase through 2021, then a DECREASE, overall effectively flat. Averaging +407 people per year with most of that being earlier in the decade. Not a ton of growth anymore.
Now let’s look at Neilsberg [6], which is a reliable source for this that has their own models based off of the Census:
2020: 65,488 (modeled, so different from the Census)
2021: 66,494
2022: 65,604
2023: 65,301
Similar story: mid-60s, peak in 2021, declining/flat population. No growth. In fact, their synopsis of the city is: “The numbers suggest that the population has already reached its peak and is showing a trend of decline.”
PCDC? That’s a quasi-city source….
2020: 72,000 [9] (starting 6,809 ABOVE the known factual number)
2021: 67,281 [7] and 73,000 [9]
2022: 75,500 [9]
2023: 75,772 [9]
2024: N/A
2025: 67,892 [8]
2026 (Projection): 73,852 [7]
2030 (Projection): 66,946 [8]
Now it’s starting to get a little odd. The numbers from the demographic reports ([7] and [8]) seem in line with about where the Census is. The numbers from the community profile ([9]) start significantly above where we know them to be true (the Census in 2020), but then trend approximately the same way… small to no growth. Outside the community profile report they’re projecting a decrease by the end of the decade. No growth.
That premise is also supported by the Pflugerville ISD enrollment numbers [18]. Up to 2023 there was no significant growth.
Finally, let’s get to the issue. Let’s look at the numbers released by the City of Pflugerville. For starters, population numbers for the city (which is the most basic of basic data points) are flat-out NOT available on the website. Get used to this lack of transparency because it’s going to come up many times. We’re forced to pull what we can from the times they happen to announce or mention a population number. That’s not very often for a city spending billions of dollars based on them:
2020: N/A (Known to be 65,191 [2])
2021: 77,629 [15]
2022: N/A
2023: 76,117 [11]
2024: 79,668 [10] [13] [14]
2025: 82,222 [12] or 88,700 to 94,200 [15]
2030: 137,816 [16] [17] (2024 article referencing 2022 article)
You can already tell that this is bonkers. For starters, knowing the number in 2020, they’re claiming growth of 12,438 in a single year… that would likely be the largest year of growth ever by a factor of 4×. It’s also not even that they’re working off a different definition of the 2020 numbers, because the same report that claims the 77,629 (2021) number also claims 65,380 in 2019 [15]. So THEY THEMSELVES are trying to claim a 12K+ jump.
They initially projected a 2025 population in the low 90Ks, then revised that down to a claimed number of 82,222 that was announced by Victor Gonzales in his State of the City address this January. But even that number is almost 20K off of any realistic estimations. How are they possibly justifying using that number? To get to 82,222 in 2025 from 65,191 in 2020 would require an average of +3,406 people a year, a number we weren’t even reaching when the city exploded in size in the 2010s. It certainly isn’t one we could possibly be at when every official metric and model is showing a decrease. How do they justify this? It’s a blatantly false number.
They even ADMIT it’s a false number. If you look at the 2026-2030 Strategic Action Plan [28], they provide a table of population by age and gender from 2023. Notably they don’t provide a total population number, but if you were to add all those numbers up, what do you get? 64,774! You can make up you own minds as to if this is intentional lying or incompetence, but it’s definitely one of them.
Then there are the projections. They already showed they had issues with projecting growth when they projected 94K people by 2025 back in 2021, but 137K by 2030? It boggles the mind that anybody would take that number seriously, let alone make financial decisions on it. It’s not even an old number. Community Impact used it as late as last year with no updates. They were expecting to add 9,691 people a year from their 79,668 number through 2030?
Every single one of us knows that not only is that not going to happen, but that anybody who suggested that seriously has absolutely no clue what they’re talking about and absolutely shouldn’t be in any position to influence policy. The only way I could even replicate a projection that high is to start with the 2020 Census number, add a data point for their (what looks like make-believe) 2023 number (showing a completely fictional 14K jump in 3 years), and then pretend that growth will consistently happen for the rest of the decade (see attached chart). In the data world, that’s called fraud.
I believe you can pretty solidly establish from this that the city has completely unbelievable and false population and growth numbers, far beyond the point of incredulity and bordering satire levels. If it wasn’t so serious it would be hysterical. Absolutely horrific data.
Also keep in mind that at no point apparently did anybody question this data. From the City Council to all the departments of the city, it seems to have just been accepted with no sanity check. Why? I have no idea. Maybe it helped them to say they ran a city with massive growth, maybe they didn’t have the basic sense to double-check numbers, maybe they’re completely unqualified to be in their positions, maybe they’re intentionally lying. It certainly is telling that it’s so difficult for even sitting councilmembers to get data from the city.
So now what happens when the planning department and the City Council makes huge, generational-debt-level decisions based off bad numbers? As I mentioned at the top, if a city thinks it needs to provide water and wastewater service to a certain number of people then they have to plan ahead and build infrastructure. What happens if the number they’re given is cartoonishly wrong? Or a lie? What happens if they’re told that in 3 years the city will more than double in size? Or that the current population is 20K higher than what it actually is? To some extent the water utility folks know what’s being used, but how is that being translated to City Hall? Also, are they expecting usage to significantly increase for the massive amounts of people that don’t exist? Is that factored in? There are a lot of questions with serious ramifications that this brings up.
------PFLUGERVILLE WASTEWATER------
According to the city website [19], our wastewater facility (the Upper Gilleland Creek Wastewater Treatment Facility) can treat 7.25 million gallons a day (MGD) and can be expanded to 10 MGD. So what is our current capacity for wastewater?
On average, a wastewater facility will process 100–125 gallons per capita per day (gpcd) [22]. That’s total city usage divided by the number of people using the utility. This includes residential, commercial, etc. The capacity calculation is total amount of capacity (in this case 7,250,000 gallons) divided by the amount per capita (let’s use the midpoint 110) = 65,900. If we were to build the expansion to the plant, it could serve 90,900.
With a city population at least over 65,000, that would indicate that we DO need a new wastewater plant or the expansion. That’s especially true because a lot of the ETJ also uses (and pays for) our wastewater. With our current population and the out-of-city usage we’re still likely not at 90K, but are we within 10 years of growth of 90K? Especially with subdivisions going in in the ETJ? Probably. So it’s perfectly reasonable to build another one (of appropriate size) because the population and growth are there to justify it and divide the cost.
Which is what we did. We are building the Wilbarger Creek Regional Wastewater Treatment Facility for $50–60M. That will add 6 MGD to our capacity for a total of 120,400 people-served capacity. That’s a totally reasonable project, and $50–60M in long-term debt is not going to break the bank. You’ve seen the population estimates above. Even with extra usage in the ETJ and if we were to average an optimistic 1,500-a-year growth rate (probably high given the declining/static recent growth), the new plant potentially could get us 25 years of coverage. Plus we have the option to also expand the current plant for an affordable amount, giving us another 25K people of capacity. If the growth rate starts booming at some point in the next couple decades, we could pivot and start building more with plenty of time to spare.
Is that what the city did? Of course not. We have already signed off on a $200 MILLION [21] expansion to a plant that’s not even built yet [20]. That would add 18 MORE MGD and increase our capacity to, hypothetically, 284,000 people.
And this is the point where I try REALLY hard not to swear.
The 65,000 citizens here now and a few in the ETJ will be paying now for infrastructure big enough for 284,000 people! People that may never exist, or might not exist for 100 years. In what delusional world is this mentally sound? One where people think a shrinking city is going to double in size to 137,000 people? See how that assumption can financially destroy us?
We should IMMEDIATELY kill Phase 2 of the new plant. That would save $200M in future spending and prevent ANOTHER exponential increase in our water bills.
------- PFLUGERVILLE WATER-------
Pflugerville gets nearly all of its drinking water from Lake Travis, pumping it into Lake Pflugerville and treating it at the Water Treatment Plant across the street on Weiss Lane. According to the city, that plant can produce a little over 17 million gallons of water a day (MGD) [23]. The city also runs some groundwater wells that can add another 6 MGD [23], giving us a total production capacity of roughly 23 MGD.
Now, how much population can that serve? Same as wastewater, cities measure this using gallons per capita per day (gpcd): total usage divided by population served. The Texas Water Development Board [24] and nearly every utility in Central Texas (including Austin, which measured it [25]) use about 130–150 gallons per person per day (gpcd) for full city usage.
At 23 MGD and a realistic 140 gpcd, our existing system can serve roughly 85,000–100,000 residents.
You saw the population calculations above and can make your own conclusions, but there is a fundamental difference here between looking at the U.S. Census estimate of 66K people vs. believing we have 80K+. It’s the difference between nearing capacity and having potentially decades left. If you use the realistic population estimates, the water system we already have easily serves our current population with plenty of room to spare.
This is the same issue as with the wastewater. The city came up with what looks like a make-believe number, and then a bunch of huge spending decisions were made reacting to it, decisions that will cost us for decades.
If we’d used real data and waited until we actually needed more capacity, there was an incredibly affordable solution available: potable water regeneration [26], which was pitched to City Council years ago but not even considered before we dropped a billion dollars on infrastructure without looking at alternatives (or growth projections). It’s a very affordable upgrade to our existing wastewater system that recycles our own treated wastewater back into drinking water. Cities across Texas have already proven this works. Wichita Falls and Big Spring built systems that safely recover 80–85% [26] of their treated wastewater, turning it back into potable water for a fraction of the cost of new treatment plants.
As we already went over, we already treat more than 7 million gallons of wastewater every day. If we recycled just 80% of that flow, that would add roughly 6 MGD of new clean water capacity.
Six million gallons a day is enormous. It would’ve extended our existing capacity by roughly 8 to 10 more years and pushed our total water production to nearly 29 MGD, enough for 110,000–120,000 people. The price would have been a few tens of millions, not hundreds. The city could’ve built a small advanced-treatment addition to the existing plant and solved the problem for a generation.
But that’s not what happened, because of course it isn’t. Instead, the city decided to move forward with a massive expansion of the Surface Water Treatment Plant from 17 to 30 MGD, plus the same 6 MGD from the wells, for a total of 36 MGD of capacity [27]. Part of the bond agreements for that project is that the utility operate at a 25% “profit” (from us) AND that the loan payments for it come out of our utility bills. You already have noticed this when you pay for water. That only will go up as they pull more from the loans for construction.
Using the same 140 gpcd assumption, that new setup can serve about 185,000 people, nearly triple our real population. Plus, a large percentage of the 66K residents of Pflugerville are on SouthWest or Manville water, meaning the city water doesn’t even have to cover the entire 66K. This is being built NOW, and it’s being paid for NOW. Every water customer on Pflugerville water is already paying higher rates for a plant designed for a fictional version of the city that might not exist for decades, if ever. We don’t have 185,000 people to share water costs; it’s possible we don’t even get to 80–90,000 the entire length of the loan agreements. That means we are fully paying for water infrastructure that we have absolutely no use for! The high costs sure aren’t helping attract any growth, and if it drives people away, that compounds the problem even further.
The city’s inability to reliably count or project growth has absolutely bankrupted us. Nobody checked the basics of the assumptions being made, and then we mortgaged our entire city’s future on an absolute fairy tale. Even if there currently were a magical population influx that was completely hidden from observation and our population was somehow 20K higher than it is, there were far more affordable options for both water and wastewater to give us decades of runway. The city set our money on fire and we should be livid!
[3] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/tables/2020-2022/cities/totals/SUB-EST2022_ALL.csv
[4] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/tables/2020-2023/cities/totals/SUB-IP-EST2023.xlsx
(slide 62, actuals through 2023)
[22] https://www.twdb.texas.gov/publications/reports/technical_notes/doc/WaterPlanningGuidelines.pdf
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