With a water plan before public, group ties loose ends
By Marty Kufus
BOERNE — With the draft of their "initially prepared plan" now in regional circulation and a series of public hearings set to begin Sept. 25, water planners Thursday worked on upcoming communications with both the public and the Legislature.
They discussed the scope and precise wording of a wide range of water-related recommendations they will make to the Legislature when their final plan is submitted.
The final version of the regional water plan is due Jan. 5 at the Texas Water Development Board, as are those of 15 other planning regions.
Members of the South Central Texas Regional Water Planning Group also critiqued an early version of a full-color, eight-page synopsis of their draft plan.
The "Region L" planning group held its monthly meeting in the Boerne Community Center.
Drawing from a printing-press run of 560,000 copies, the regional group will pay the major newspaper in each of 21 affected counties to carry the tabloid publication as an insertion, public-participation contractor Maggie Moorhouse explained.
"We’re trying to condense three huge volumes [of the draft plan] into eight pages," Moorhouse told the planners.
The insertion also will explain the regional planning process that was created in 1997 under Texas Senate Bill 1.
The printing and distribution will cost the planning group about $40,000, she said later.
Locally, the insertion will appear in the Sept. 20 Wilson County News, four days before it appears in the Sunday issue of the San Antonio Express-News.
"In the San Antonio paper, we know we’ll be stuffed in with the comics section," Moorhouse remarked.
"It’s got good readership," planning-group Chairman Evelyn Bonavita joked.
Edwards water
The group heard an impromptu report by one planner concerning emergency measures to temporarily ban the use of lawn sprinklers in order to maintain the Edwards Aquifer’s spring flows.
Regional planner Greg Ellis, general manager of the San Antonio-based Edwards Aquifer Authority, said measurements that day indicated the flow at the Comal Springs was at, or dropping to, 150 cubic feet per second.
At that rate, he said, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service considers endangered species in the springs to be threatened.
There also are concerns about the downstream effect, on the Guadalupe River, of reduced aquifer spring flows.
Ellis said the authority’s actions in its multi-county jurisdiction should head off possible lawsuits by the fish and wildlife service or the Sierra Club.
Two regions
An interregional disagreement remained unresolved Thursday: the amount of Simsboro Aquifer water available for export to San Antonio from Bas-trop County.
Bastrop County is in the Lower Colorado water-planning region ("Region K").
Hydrologists from the San Antonio Water System (SAWS) and the Lost Pines Groundwater Conservation District, of Bastrop, did not attend Thursday’s meeting.
Region L planners had hoped to hear out the opposing arguments during this meeting.
SAWS has a contract to buy aquifer water in Bastrop County — and that proposed pipeline project is among Region L’s recommended "options" — but the quantity exceeds a limit set by Lost Pines: 5,000 acre-feet a year.
An acre-foot equals 325,860 gallons.
The two regions’ final water plans should agree on water production in such a project, according to discussion.
If not, the Texas Water Development Board will have to decide, Region K’s liaison representative, Stovy Bowlin, said.
Bowlin, who is general manager of the Barton Springs-Edwards Aquifer Conservation District, said he hoped the two regional planning groups could resolve the matter.
"I’m all for that," replied Jorge Arroyo, a water-board official and nonvoting member of the Region L group.
Some Region L planners even questioned whether their group has jurisdiction over SAWS’ business deal.