By Marty Kufus
Wilson County News
September 26, 2001

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS — Some local residents and the San Antonio River Authority will challenge a proposal by the New Braunfels-based Canyon Re-gional Water Authority to increase by more than a hundredfold its right to pump from the Cibolo Creek in Wilson County.
SARA and concerned local residents were to send letters asking the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Com-mission to schedule both a public meeting and a “contested case hearing” for Canyon Regional’s application, according to discussion last week.
Their deadline is Sept. 28.
Canyon Regional asked the TNRCC to allow it to pump up to 5,042 acre-feet a year from the Cibolo Creek for “irrigation and municipal purposes,” a TNRCC notice said.
Canyon Regional currently has rights to 42 acre-feet a year, the TNRCC said.
An acre-foot equals about 325,860 gallons.
“This is not an insignificant request, and should’ve been in the regional [water] plan,” Steve Raabe, SARA’s director of planning and development, told about 20 participants in a Sept. 19 meeting here.
“This is kinda going to be the test case,” he predicted, for the TNRCC and proposed water projects that are not in the regional — and ultimately, state — water plan.
Canyon Regional’s application was received in August 2000, the TNRCC notice said, and additional information has been received through June of this year.
The South Central Texas Regional Water Planning Group, which purportedly had been apprised last year of area water suppliers’ future projects, sent its 20 1/2-county plan to Austin in January.
Raabe was accompanied at last week’s meeting by JC Turner, a Wilson County representative on SARA’s board of directors.

According to the TNRCC’s description of Canyon Regional’s diversion site, the creek water would be taken at a point between Sutherland Springs and the S.H. 97-U.S. 87 intersection, meeting participants said.
The meeting, held in the community building, drew several creek-side landowners — some of whom use the Cibolo’s water in farming and ranching — and members of the Wilson County Water Action Project.
If an additional 5,000 acre-feet a year came out of the Cibolo, it will be “something that resembles sludge that’s left over,” project Chairman Diane Savage remarked.
Raabe and Turner said that, just that afternoon, SARA’s board had instructed the authority’s general manager to challenge Canyon Regional’s request to the TNRCC.
The San Antonio River Authority’s mission is to conserve, develop, and protect the water resources in the river basin, and that includes the Cibolo Creek in Wilson County, Raabe explained after the meeting.
In a report last week to Turner and other board members, SARA’s technical staff said it “questions whether there is adequate unappropriated water at this location to satisfy the amount requested by” Canyon Regional.
The report said the staff “also feels the diversion rates and minimum flow restrictions requested do not leave enough water in the stream downstream of the diversion site to satisfy existing downstream water rights and instream flows.”
No representatives of Canyon Regional attended the meeting, the second of its kind this month.
Canyon Regional Water Authority was created by the Legislature in 1989.
The authority is a non-taxing special district that “works as a partnership of water-supply corporations, cities, and districts responsible for acquiring, treating, and transporting potable water,” according to its Web site (www.crwa.com).
Canyon Regional’s members are Bexar Metropolitan Water District; the Crystal Clear, East Central, Springs Hill, Maxwell, County Line, Martindale, and SS water supply corporations; the cities of Cibolo, Marion, and La Vernia; Green Valley Special Utility District; Bexar-Medina-Atascosa Water Control and Improvement District; and, Guadalupe Valley Development Corporation.
The additional Cibolo Creek water requested by Canyon Regional would go to the Bexar County-based East Central Water Supply Corporation, according to discussion last week.