By Marty Kufus

PLEASANTON — The board of directors of the rural aquifer district last week accepted landowners’ petitions and scheduled an election on annexation of the southern tip of Bexar County, in which San Antonio is building part of a $215 million water project.
If the Evergreen Underground Water Conservation District did annex there, its existing rules could severely limit the San Antonio Water System’s plans for the area, district officials acknowledged.
Several southern-Bexar landowners attending the Evergreen’s Aug. 14 meeting said they fear SAWS’ future pumping of the Carrizo Aquifer water in their area would harm their own shallow wells.
“We know about the excellent work done by the Evergreen … to protect and conserve the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer,” spokesman Craig Knapp said. “We need your help.”
Public hearings will be held well ahead of the Feb. 2 election in southern Bexar County, according to discussion during the Evergreen meeting. (See map of affected area.)
The Evergreen district, created by the Legislature in 1965, currently comprises Wilson, Karnes, Atascosa, and Frio counties.
If its boundaries were extended into southern Bexar, the Evergreen’s ground-water rules — if left unchanged — would disrupt SAWS’ plans for aquifer storage and recovery and “short term” production pumping.
A small portion of the Carrizo Aquifer reaches northward into southern Bexar.
SAWS officials have said they hope to have the operation there going in 2003, using an eventual 30 water wells and an 18-mile transmission pipeline that is 5 feet in diameter.
There currently is no ground-water district in that area of southern Bexar County.
“I’m glad you’re all here,” Evergreen President Ken Stephens, of Atascosa County, told the petitioners at the meeting. “I just wish you’d been here sooner.”
Knapp and some others brought petitions with 89 signatures, purportedly of landowners in southern Bexar County. Each name and address had been checked at the Bexar Appraisal District, Knapp said, adding that more petitions with signatures were coming.
He estimated the affected area has a population of 8,000 or more.
Evergreen General Manager Mike Mahoney said the district’s board and staff had been unaware of the petition drive. Mahoney added he found out when one of its organizers phoned him and asked for the item to be placed on the meeting’s agenda.
Evergreen board members Paul Bordovsky and Fabian Jendrusch of Karnes County, Clifton Stacy and Blaine Schorp of Frio County, and Steve Snider, Doug Brownlow, and Mark Mitchell of Wilson County all voted to accept the petitions and set a Feb. 2 election. Board member William Ruple, of Atascosa County, was absent.
“In this business,” Mitchell told Knapp and the other petitioners, “we’re not looking for 100-percent victories, but for outcomes we can live with.”
“We support your water rights … because we’re in the same boat,” Schorp said.
A SAWS spokesman said Friday she learned of the proposed annexation by reading about it on the Wilson County News Web site.
“We’re still studying what the implication will be for us,” Susan Butler, SAWS’ director of water-resources development, said.
“The San Antonio Water System has supported ground-water management for many years,” she said. “Ground-water management is really the way to go … and the Evergreen has done nothing but great work.”
The landowners’ push for annexation by the Evergreen “seems remarkably quick,” Butler said. “I think it sends a message about the concern people in Texas have about water… Water will remain on the public agenda for a long time.”
The February ballot in southern Bexar County will have two parts, Mahoney said.
It will ask landowners whether they want to join the Evergreen and pay its district property tax. (The rate now is 01.7 cents per $100 valuation.) The second part will be a list of candidates for two positions on the Evergreen’s board.

The area under consideration for annexation is roughly triangular in shape. It is bounded on the west by S.H. 16; on the north by Loop 1604; on the east by U.S. 181; and, on the south by the Wilson and Atascosa county lines, according to the petition.
The petition’s signers want the Evergreen “to annex this territory in accordance with the procedures set forth in the Texas Water Code, in chapter 36 …,” a petition said.
“Our portion of the Carrizo Aquifer has been identified for a major production project by SAWS because we live in an unprotected and unregulated area,” Knapp told the Evergreen board.
“We fear this extensive mining of the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer in southern Bexar County will have a catastrophic effect on the quality and quantity of our water supply now, and on our children’s water supply in the future,” he said. “We also know that our neighbors share our concerns, especially in Atascosa and Wilson counties.”
Knapp predicted “the majority of folks with independent wells out there will go along with this” annexation proposal.
Evergreen officials and residents in neighboring areas of Wilson and Atascosa counties have expressed alarm over the possible “draw-down” (lowering) effect, on nearby shallow wells, of SAWS’ planned pumping of the Carrizo in southern Bexar (March 7 Wilson County News).
The possible draw-down has not been satisfactorily calculated, Evergreen officials have said. The production project is not listed in the “Region L” plan.
In recent years, SAWS bought 3,223 acres of farm and ranchland in southern Bexar — some of the properties extended into Wilson County — for its aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) project.
The goal of ASR is to inject excess Edwards Aquifer water during wet seasons into storage in the Carrizo, for withdrawal during drought or San Antonio’s peak summer demands.
In 1999, Evergreen directors approved a five-year interlocal agreement with SAWS and the San Antonio River Authority. It set out the terms for the testing of an expanded ASR project in Wilson and/or Atascosa, should SAWS’ southern-Bexar project prove successful.
The Evergreen’s rules, which can be changed by the board, now prohibit ASR in the district.
Relations between the rural district and SAWS entered troubled waters last February, though, after Evergreen officials found out SAWS also intended to use its ASR site for “short term” production pumping of the Carrizo Aquifer.

SAWS representatives said the pumping would occur between 2004 (lately, amended to 2003) and 2007, providing extra water while major projects are being built elsewhere to serve San Antonio.
The goal in the short-term production is 30,000 acre-feet a year. An acre-foot equals about 325,860 gallons.
In the Evergreen’s jurisdiction, water pumping is limited to 2 acre-feet per acre of land per year. If applied to SAWS’ land, that pumping limit would be just under 6,500 acre-feet annually, or about one-fifth of SAWS’ original goal.
The Evergreen’s rules require payment of an “export fee” for water taken out of the district. Under recent state legislation, that fee would be a maximum of 02.5 cents per 1,000 gallons.
SAWS’ cost estimates for its southern Bexar project, with connection to San Antonio, total $215 million.
That includes land purchases and the drilling of ASR wells, which also would be used to bring up Carrizo water in the production mode.
There would be the construction of pumps and about 25 miles of pipeline (18 of it to the city, from the rural site), plus integration into the existing water system, according to SAWS project engineer Mike Brinkmann.
An early version of this story was posted Thursday at www.wilsoncountynews.com.