By Marty Kufus

SAN ANTONIO — With a regional water plan headed to Austin and his own retirement coming the end of this month, the top official at the San Antonio Water System last week spoke candidly about one of the most contentious issues he and other planners had faced: the “Cibolo Reservoir” proposal.

“I see the chances of that [project in the future] as zero,” Mike Thuss, president and chief executive officer of SAWS, remarked outside Thursday’s meeting of the South Central Texas Regional Water Planning Group.

Thuss is a “municipal” representative and voting member of the group.

The 16,000-acre Cibolo Reservoir proposal was not recommended in the first installment of the 50-year regional water plan. But planning will continue through 2050.

“The project is feasible,” Thuss said later in an interview. “The bottom line is, I don’t think that the Cibolo [Reservoir] is going to move from being feasible to being viable unless the local community decides it wants it.”

SAWS, the largest water purveyor in the 20 1/2-county “Region L,” serves more than 300,000 metro-area residences and businesses.

Thuss has been its president and CEO since 1997, and was its chief operating officer for 18 months before that. He will retire Jan. 31 from SAWS, but reportedly will remain a consultant for several months.

During Thursday’s meeting, Thuss told another planner that he did not know if he would remain on the regional group in its coming five-year planning cycle.

Region L’s planners signed off on the three-volume plan Thursday. It was due Friday at the Texas Water Development Board.

The 50-year plan did not recommend any new, large reservoirs.

Much of the Region L group’s challenge in the nearly three-year planning cycle they have just completed was in providing additional water, through production projects and conservation, to meet Bexar County’s future needs. Several other counties also have projected shortfalls through the year 2050.

The Cibolo Reservoir first was proposed in the 1960s as a San Antonio project, and reportedly drew little opposition then in Wilson County. But in that span of time, local attitudes changed greatly.

A fear expressed last year by local opponents of the proposal was that San Antonio will, through condemnation and well-financed litigation, force a reservoir project on Wilson County to help meet the metro area’s future need for water storage.
Thuss suggested that is not going to happen.

“I don’t see, in Bexar County, any desire to condemn property for a sole-purpose reservoir for municipal water supply.”

He repeated a point he had made last year as the planners debated the merits of large, new reservoirs in general and the Cibolo specifically: Reservoirs can be built for multiple purposes, including recreation, “and they can be large economic generators.”

But a Cibolo Reservoir won’t be built “as long as you can keep the landowners united in their desire not to sell their land,” he added.

Thuss said he believed his comments also reflected the view of SAWS’ board, whose members include San Antonio’s mayor and representatives picked by the city council.

“There doesn’t seem to be a desire,” Thuss said, “by any elected or appointed officials that I know of” to condemn land (legally force the sale of private property for public use).

Thuss said he is satisfied with the Region L plan.

“It’s a fine plan… [with] alternatives, a menu of items … that adequately cover our long-term [water] storage needs,” he said.

Thuss has worked in larger water planning efforts in the past, as a career Army officer in the corps of engineers. The Alabama native was a 1968 West Point graduate, and received his master’s degree in civil engineering in 1979 at the University of California-Berkeley.

Corps of Engineers’ water projects in the Missouri River basin, he said, affected 14 million people. By contrast, the south-central Texas region is projected to have a population of 4.5 million by 2050.

“It’s not the biggest [plan] and it’s not the smallest one” he’d participated in, Thuss remarked.

“The thing that strikes me,” he observed, “it’s the year 2001 and our region is just coming to the realization, ‘It’s the economy.’ You have large firms in San Antonio saying, ‘We’re leaving if there’s not a long-term regional [water] plan.’”

“If the economy of San Antonio fails … a lot of jobs that people in Wilson County have will disappear,” he said.

In creating a long-term water plan, Thuss added, “we [San Antonio] couldn’t go it alone.”

In the coming years, all of the state’s 16 regional water plans will be subject to update or amendment by their planning groups, under the auspices of the Texas Water Development Board.

This year, the water board will assemble the 16 plans into one state plan for submission to the Legislature.

The water board’s summary of each of the regional plans is due Feb. 2 at the Legislature, according to planning-group discussion Thursday.