By By Marty Kufus
Wilson County News

SANDY OAKS — About 200 people packed the volunteer fire station here in southern Bexar County last week for a ground-water district’s hearing on annexation that briefly turned into a forum for county politics.

The five attending members of the board of the Evergreen Underground Water Conservation District said nothing to the audience after President Ken Stephens declared a quorum.

They got earfuls, though, during the hour and 50-minute public hearing.

The Feb. 19 audience was half-again larger and the rhetoric sharper than during an October hearing, which was held here in preparation for a Feb. 2 annexational election.

That election failed to receive federal clearance in Washington and was challenged in court in San Antonio. The Evergreen’s board cancelled it and tentatively decided to hold one May 4.

One of the issues raised in the federal lawsuit was the absence of Spanish in the Evergreen’s public-information efforts.

At the outset of last week’s hearing, a designated translator introduced himself to the audience and offered his services.

There were no takers.

Arriving late, a lone county official, Commissioner Tommy Adkisson, took his turn at the microphone — even though the area proposed for annexation isn’t in his precinct 4.

The impact area is formed on the south by the Atascosa and Wilson county lines, S.H. 16 on the west, Loop 1604 on the north, and U.S. 181 on the east.

Facing the audience, Adkisson backpedaled from two resolutions he and the commissioners’ court approved a week earlier. One was anti-annexation; the other was pro-SAWS and pro-Bexar Metropolitan Water District (Feb. 20 Wilson County News).

Adkisson said the resolutions, which were heard collectively as "consent items" on the Feb. 12 agenda, were "inappropriate."

"I have an interest in everything that happens" in southern Bexar "because it bleeds into precinct 4," he said.

Adkisson said he never again would allow an item on the commissioners’ "consent agenda" that "deals so lightly" with a topic of such weight.

The commissioner also said he would invite SAWS President Eugene Habiger, plus a member of SAWS’ board and a senior official from BexarMet, to a meeting with southern-Bexar residents.

Before him, Adkisson’s primary-election opponent, Mario Salas, used his three minutes of speech for a diatribe.

"I don’t trust SAWS as far as I can spit," he said, drawing laughter and applause.

Salas said its vehicles once tore up a road in his eastside neighborhood, but SAWS "lied for six months" about the repairs.

If he is elected to the Bexar County Commission, Salas said, "I will fight for you all and I will bring my crowd down here" to help.

The local county commissioner, Robert Tejeda of precinct 1, had been invited along with the rest of the commissioners’ court, pro-annexation activists said outside the fire station.

Tejeda did not attend. (He was the author of the two controversial resolutions.)

The precinct-1 commissioner’s absence did not go unnoticed by the crowd.

"I think you need to remember that at election time," one audience member pointedly remarked.

Toward the end of the hearing, Evergreen General Manager Mike Mahoney took back the microphone from SAWS project Director Mike Brinkmann to urge spectators off an argumentative tangent.

By then, there was an angry murmur and a half-dozen hands in the air signaling more questions for the lone representative of the metro area’s largest water purveyor.

SAWS, which now is drilling 21 water wells on its 3,200 acres (just east of I-37 at Hardy Road and F.M. 536), wants to be a "good neighbor," Brinkmann said.

Good science backs the system’s plans for storage of excess Edwards Aquifer water in a portion of the Carrizo Aquifer, he said, as well as the proposed Carrizo pumping of 14,000 acre-feet a year if there are "stage 3" drought restrictions in San Antonio.

Just that morning, he said, SAWS’ board formally approved a "Carrizo Aquifer policy" for mitigation (damage control) in case neighbors’ wells are harmed by SAWS’ project.

Brinkmann acknowledged there would be "fluctuations" in neighboring water wells during aquifer storage and recovery and/or production pumping.

A few members of the audience loudly expressed skepticism that "excess" Edwards water ever would be available for storage.

The Evergreen’s board was to have held its second public hearing on Feb. 26 at the district’s headquarters in Pleasanton.
It then was to vote on acceptance of southern-Bexar petitions for annexation and vote on an order scheduling an election there, according to an agenda posted Thursday.

The Evergreen’s management plan for the district — currently, Wilson, Karnes, Atascosa, and Frio counties — allows production pumping of up to 2 acre-feet per acre of land per year. (An acre-foot is 325,860 gallons.)

The Evergreen also regulates pumping through well-spacing requirements. Under Chapter 36 of the Texas Water Code, the board may charge a "transportation fee" of up to 2.5 cents per 1,000 gallons taken from the district.

The Evergreen’s current property tax rate is 1.74 cents per $100 valuation.

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