Turn on a tap in Anna and the water reaching it took one of two paths to get there. About two-thirds of it arrives as treated surface water, purchased from the Greater Texoma Utility Authority and processed by the North Texas Municipal Water District before it ever reaches an Anna pipe. The rest comes from underneath the city itself, pulled from the Trinity Aquifer through seven deep-water wells that the City of Anna owns and operates directly. Both sources carry natural dissolved minerals common to Texas groundwater and surface supplies alike, which is why Anna’s water tests as genuinely hard, in the range of about 150 parts per million — hard enough that it leaves a visible mark on fixtures and water heaters over the years, a detail longtime residents learn to work around and new arrivals usually discover the first time they notice scale on a showerhead.
That blended system wasn’t designed for a city of this size. Anna’s population estimate climbed to 35,245 by 2025, up from fewer than 17,000 residents at the 2020 census, and a water and sewer system sized for a town half that size doesn’t simply stretch to cover the difference without real capital investment — new wells, expanded treatment capacity, and pipe capacity to reach subdivisions that didn’t exist a few years ago.
The infrastructure catching up in real time
The clearest visible sign of the city investing in its older infrastructure sits at Sherley Heritage Park, where the Anna City Council has approved rehabilitating the historic water tower that stands on the property — a landmark tied to the town’s original water system, now being preserved even as the modern network around it is rebuilt to serve a population many times the tower’s original design. It’s a small but telling example of how a fast-growing town has to manage two water stories simultaneously: honoring the infrastructure that got the town this far, while building the entirely new capacity that a doubling population actually requires.
Behind the scenes, that new capacity means additional wells, expanded interconnections with the regional surface-water system, and coordination with the North Texas Municipal Water District on long-term supply planning, since a city Anna’s size can no longer rely solely on its own local wells the way it could a couple of decades ago. Every new subdivision approved by the council also comes with its own water and sewer extension requirements, which is part of why utility capacity is one of the standing questions any new development has to answer before the council will approve it.
What it means for a household
For an individual homeowner, the practical takeaway is less about the city’s capital planning and more about the two things that show up on a monthly bill and inside a home’s own plumbing: water hardness, which affects how quickly water heaters, fixtures, and appliances accumulate scale, and utility billing, which in Anna runs through the city directly for water, sewer, trash, and recycling rather than a private utility. Knowing that the hardness is a structural feature of the local supply, not a plumbing problem specific to one house, is useful context the first time a homeowner notices buildup and wonders whether something’s wrong with their own system rather than the water itself.
