Box Elder — planning for the future

Doug Curry is the Director of Public Works of the city of Box Elder. He is also on the board of WDRWS where he serves as the secretary and treasurer.

Box Elder is a growing community in western South Dakota of approximately 13,000 people. Like the rest of western South Dakota and much of the country, Box Elder is facing a water crisis that is centered around both an extended drought and an unprecedented growth in population.

As Public Works Director, Curry
gets a front row seat to the resource challenges and opportunities of his community. In recent years, Box Elder has experienced rapid growth from a variety of sources, and the city’s water supply has kept up. “Box Elder is sitting pretty good right now,” Curry said, “with our three wells, plus a fourth
that we just dug.” But Curry and an increasing number of people in western South Dakota have arrived at the realization that future water security
is not a guarantee without intentional action. “With a couple of drought years and our regular growth, we’ve already seen that we aren’t going to be able to meet those needs — let alone the growth with the political refugees that we’ve had move to South Dakota.”

But Curry doesn’t necessarily view these challenges as a problem. Rather, he sees them as opportunities. “It’s a wonderful place to be, and I would not be doing my job right as the guy who’s in charge of water for the municipality if I wasn’t looking to the future and saying ‘what if’ and ‘how do we prevent that from happening.’”