Bastrop, Tx–The Bastrop City Council gave possibly its final blessing Oct. 27 to a series of agreements to permit the development of almost 9,700 acres west of Texas 95 between Bastrop and Elgin for a mixture of residential and commercial uses, including some 7,000 residential units and roughly 300,000 square feet of commercial space.
The project will be served with wastewater treatment by the Lower Colorado River Authority and its water supplied by Aqua Water Supply Corp. of Bastrop. A fully executed service agreement with Aqua remains to be finalized.
If developed as presently envisioned and annexed by Bastrop over the next two to four decades, as the accords provide for, the project would more than double the city’s size and perhaps its population. The agreements provisionally approved by the city council
this week also provide for Bastrop to collect sales tax revenues from the project.
The entire development area, including the former 6,700-acre Steiner Ranch, either already is or will be included in Bastrop’s extra-territorial jurisdiction, an area where the city exercises some development controls, according to officials.
Tags: XS Ranch project ok'd
Well isn’t that just lovely! Bastrop heads down the same road as Pflugerville, Round Rock, Georgetown, Austin and countless other towns who sold their souls to developers and their crooked politician lackeys. There is plenty of money to be made by developers and those who sign off on these deals. Citizens and taxpayers have no say in the shaping of their own county and city. Will be interesting to see where the water for this project is going to come from. I suspect they will try to suck the Carrizo – Wilcox Aquifer dry and then impose water restrictions.
So long, small town Bastrop, it was good to know ya.
So another observer, Jackthebearwhatever, has spotted what may be the Achilles heel of the whole XS Ranch project–where’s the water coming from? If Aqua Water Supply Corp. is going to be the provider, where’s the water coming from? Who else can sign up for the job?
Probably we’ll have to wait for Aqua to execute an agreement with the XS Ranch folks to know much more. But keep in mind a few facts: 1) the water must either come from the Colorado River or groundwater formations. 2) LCRA, which controls the river water, recently began discussing a moratorium on new firm water sales because of the ongoing two-year drought; and 3) the most likely groundwater source has to be the XS Ranch site itself, a project which anticipates building 7,000 residential units and 300,000 square feet of retail space while leaving 3,500 acres of its 9,700-acre project “undeveloped.”
So where do the wells go? Where does the water go and to what uses?
And why aren’t the Bastrop County Environmental Network and related groups asking these questions ahead of me and JacktheBear, etc., who are mostly amateurs in such matters?
And, Jack, we really said goodbye to “small town Bastrop” some time ago, in case you hadn’t noticed.