House may reverse course on LCRA sunset review,

Two years after passing a measure calling for the region’s largest provider of wholesale water and electricity to open itself to further scrutiny by the Legislature, lawmakers appear set to reverse direction.

The House could vote Wednesday on a measure that would repeal a law subjecting the Lower Colorado River Authority and a host of other river authorities to sunset review.

The LCRA, a nonprofit utility based in Austin, operates coaland gas-fired power plants that provide electricity to retail utilities from the Hill Country to Bastrop County, owns thousands of miles of transmission lines, oversees the dams that form the Highland Lakes, and doles out water for more than a million Central Texans. Its budget hovers around $1 billion annually.

For years lawmakers had failed to subject the LCRA to sunset review, a process that would require the LCRA to further open its operations to legislative investigators — the river authority already is periodically examined by the state environmental agency, state auditors and financial accounting checks.

But in 2015, lawmakers passed legislation calling for review of about 20 river authorities.

Now they may change course again, with river authority officials complaining about the high cost of complying with the legislative review.

LCRA officials, for example, say the cost of such a review will be $2.8 million.

“Any and all costs associated with a sunset review of water operations will be borne 100 percent by our water customers in the form of a rate increase,” LCRA general manager Phil Wilson told members of the House Natural Resources Committee this month. “This will affect Cedar Park, Leander, Marble Falls, Lago Vista, Pflugerville and Dripping Springs, just to name a few of our ... water customers.”

Officials at the Central Texas Water Coalition, an association of lakeside communities, including most of those mentioned by Wilson, have long argued the LCRA releases too much water for downriver farmers and has been pressing the river authority to divulge more information about its regional water use projections — and they have long differed with the river authority about whether their members should help foot the bill for a reservoir under construction in rice-farming country downstream of Austin. The association has put out an action alert, asking its members to write their lawmakers to preserve the sunset review option.

“The decisions of the appointed boards of these powerful entities affect all Texans, yet citizens have had difficulties obtaining information from them and have had little recourse to dispute their decisions,” David Lindsay, vice president for technical research at the Central Texas Water Coalition, told lawmakers at the same committee hearing.

Rep. Lyle Larson, R-San Antonio, said the law passed two years ago was a misstep inspired by drought conditions that had dogged the state ahead of the 2015 legislative session.

“Any time we have a drought ... the Legislature all of a sudden is focused on: ‘What can we do to make (river authorities) hold water in these lakes?’ ” Larson told fellow members of the House Committee on Natural Resources on April 12.

“No amount of sunset review is going to change the releases” said state Rep. Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, who has served on a river authority.