Fort Bend County MUD 34

What the filing says

Fort Bend County MUD 34 serves 1,709 retail connections and about 4,965 people. Because it reports fewer than 3,300 connections, it is on a five-year water loss audit cycle with TWDB.

What the record shows

9.5% non-revenue water in FY2020, higher than 23% of the 1,775 Texas systems that filed that year.

• The figure is roughly flat across the record.

The reported figure is stable, moving 4.7 points a year against a Texas median of 5.81, so the level is more likely to reflect the system than the paperwork.

How to read the recoverable figure

Apparent loss is water that reached a customer and was never billed — under-registering meters, data-handling errors, unauthorized use. It is valued at the retail rate, because recovering it is revenue, and it is recoverable inside a budget year without capital work. Real loss is valued at variable production cost only: eliminating a leak saves what it cost to treat and pump the water, not what it would have sold for. Adding those two at the same rate is how a loss study produces a number nobody in a finance department believes.

As computed in the filed audit itself: apparent loss valued at this utility's own reported retail price of water, real loss at its own reported variable production cost. Not our estimate.