Tamworth gets a say on draft water plan for city's next 20 years

State bureaucrats travelled to Tamworth on Thursday afternoon for a consultation meeting on the second round of the region's Draft Regional Water Strategy.

Staff from Water NSW and Water Infrastructure NSW laid out the long-term plan for the region to an audience of about two dozen residents, irrigators and experts who attended the meeting, at Wests Diggers club.

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Several members of the audience used the consultation meeting to argue for adopting or speeding up a transition to recycled water, either for industrial and commercial use, or for residential consumption.

One participant argued for a network of pipelines, statewide, to take water from desalination plants on the coast inland for use in households and businesses.

The Namoi Draft Regional Water Strategy is open for consultation until September 18.

An earlier version of the draft plan went through a consultation process last year.

Ultimately the scheme will govern local water plans for between 20 and 40 years.

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Above all, the water plan aims to mitigate the "real and urgent risk" of Tamworth running out of water, a condition that would force the state government to evacuate the city, it claims.

The very first item on the agenda is a $1.3 billion new Dungowan Dam.

The proposed new water storage would easily halve the risk of Tamworth running out of water alone, but "in the long term, without additional action to reduce demand or improve supply, the risks to Tamworth's water supplies increase as the city's demand on water sources grows in a changing climate".

Following the public consultation process, the department will develop an implementation plan to set out milestones for achieving objectives, in the coming months and years.

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