Austin American-Statesman reporter Asher Price is due a tip of the hat for his Nov. 18 story on negotiations to sell up to 40,000 acre feet of Bastrop and Lee County groundwater a year to the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority to support population growth, probably in the area between Lockhart and San Marcos and the corridor along the Texas 130 toll road east of Interstate 35.
The news, really, is not that GBRA wants to buy groundwater from somebody, somewhere. They’ve been in the market for some years now without having struck a deal with anyone so far. Essentially there’s no more water GBRA can sell from its only reliable source, Canyon Lake, and there’s no money anywhere to build new impoundments.
However Price’s story makes startlingly clear some basic facts about the potential water future of the Bastrop area and how Texas law and current water policy could allow rural areas with (present) excess groundwater resources to be plundered for profit to support continued urban sprawl between Austin and San Antonio.
Bastrop and Lee County lie atop a segment of the Wilcox-Carrizo Aquifer presently assigned by state law to the supervision of the Lost Pines Groundwater Conservation District. The district presently estimates production from this source at 26,000 acre feet per year. The Texas Water Development Board, a state agency, estimates the district’s production capacity at perhaps 73,000 acre feet per year.
So what’s the problem? Private water marketing hustlers, smelling future profits, are busy trying to arrange commercial deals to soak up all that capacity and more, even as the Bastrop area is poised for potentially explosive growth in the next decade or two.
Price properly identifies some key figures in the race to tie up Central Texas groundwater resources and hints at some implications for the Bastrop area. First, perhaps, is an outfit called End-Op which is headed by former Williamson County commissioner Frankie Limmer, who is also building a new funeral home in Bastrop. Irony? We’ll see.
End-Op has leased significant pumping rights in Lee and northern Bastrop County and is talking to GBRA about selling it perhaps 40,000 acre feet per year. So far Limmer has not actually sought production permits from the Lost Pines conservation district, perhaps in part because its policy is not to grant water export permits unless there is a known and signed customer. A rival coalition of groundwater interests, calling itself Sustainable Water Resources, has also talked to Lost Pines about permits to produce some 45,000 acre feet a year. So far, however, SWR has not revealed any actual or potential customers, though its officials have dickered some with GBRA in the recent past.
Then there’s Blue Water, another water marketing enterprise, which already holds permits to produce up to 71,000 acre feet a year just across the border from the Lost Pines district in Milam and Burleson County. According to preliminary studies by the Lost Pines district, Blue Water’s proposed production could lower water levels as far away as Bastrop County by 100 feet or more.
These numbers already add up to more than the Bastrop-Lee County district can likely yield over a sustained period, say 50 years.
And Price doesn’t mention some smaller, more advance deals to supply Bastrop and Lee County water to areas closer to Austin. This year, for instance, the City of Manor paid Bastrop County $25,000 to sign a contract allowing the use of county road rights of way for a pipeline to send water (perhaps a million gallons a day from the McDade-Paige area) to Manor’s spreading subdivisions in eastern Travis County. If Manor actually builds this transmission line, Bastrop County gets another $300,000.
And don’t forget the contract signed this month between the XS Ranch development, west of Texas 95 just north of Bastrop, with Aqua Water Supply Corp., a member-owned utility based in Bastrop. Aqua agreed to supply XS Ranch with water for the equivalent of almost 7,500 housing units, apparently from its nearby Camp Swift well field. If built as presently planned, XS Ranch would have more residents than Bastrop does today. Bastrop was sending about 2 million gallons a day to its customers this summer, and the city is adding new water production capacity as fast as it can locate promising well sites.
Meanwhile the Lost Pines Groundwater Conservation District struggles to balance its conservation goals with the growing local demand and the ambitions of commercial water developers with deep pockets and an eye on more profitable markets farther afield. State law limits the power of such districts to restrict or curtail the export of water to other areas, even when they lie outside the impacted river watershed basin.
In that light a Nov. 21 guest column in the Austin daily bragging about the far sighted wisdom of Texas’ water planning process offers little comfort or support for local officials on the front lines of the state’s water wars. State Rep. Bill Callegari, a Houston area Republican who is vice chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, wraps his praise of the current process in various vague verbal phrases designed to disguise the plain truth: the groundwater of rural Texas is for sale to the highest bidders regardless of the needs of the local folks most likely to be left high and dry, in some cases like Bastrop and Lee County, within a generation or two.