The Lake Rowlands project is being coordinated and organised by Central Tablelands Water and will be funded by the NSW government, the pipeline will be constructed by Water NSW, also funded by the state government.

With that in mind the state government is now looking at how the two projects interrelate and is treating the decision making process as one larger project, rather than as two separate ones.

Chairman of CTW, David Somervaille said despite the separation of the projects by the two different institutions, the overall control of water comes through the water division within the department of Primary Industry and the Environment.

"There are three possible options for Lake Rowlands that we submitted back in June so that the government could decide which of the three that they should spend on making the final business case for," he said.

"So in parallel with that Water NSW is getting on with their business case for the pipeline.

"And now the government has decided that they can't be in isolation of each other because you need to make some assumptions as to how high Lake Rowlands will be before you work out how you'll construct the pipeline."

Mr Somervaille said that Water NSW was currently working on what's known as the secure yield calculations of both Carcoar Dam and Lake Rowlands catchments.

"They'll come up with some definitive volume of water that will be available in a typical year,' he said.

"So we're just waiting on that to come in and the latest we've heard is it will be March."

Frustrating as that is for Mr Somervaille and CTW, their project is simple.

"We just want to raise the wall at Lake Rowlands as that will give us much more water security for our existing customer base," he said.

Customers in Canowindra and other Central Tablelands Water communities were on Level 5 water restrictions last summer.