Groundwater district looks ahead
A representative of the Travis County Groundwater Conservation District addressed the Bee Cave City Council during its March 13 meeting about new efforts from the district that includes the cities of Bee Cave, Lakeway and West Lake Hills as well as unincorporated portions of the county.
The update was presented by district president Rick Scadden, who has served on the Bee Cave Planning and Zoning Commission.
The district, created by House Bill 4345 during the 2017 Texas legislative session, is charged with developing aquifer storage and recovery projects along the southwestern corner of Travis County, including the Barton Springs/Edwards Aquifer Conservation District, the bill states.
The district’s temporary board voted unanimously March 2 to cancel its May election that would have confirmed the creation of the district and appoint its seven-member board consisting of one representative each from Bee Cave, Lakeway and West Lake Hills and four representatives from the unincorporated areas of Travis County, Scadden told the council.
The legislation passed last year directed the election to be held in May, Scadden said. However, the cost of a May election was calculated by Travis County officials, who manage the election, to be $150,000 to $200,000 because the district would be “one of the major participants in the election based on the number of potential voters within their jurisdiction,” he said.
“As a new entity that just started in late-January, and having no funds, we really had a hard time with that (May election cost),” Scadden said. “It’s kind of an unfunded mandate from the Legislature in a sense.”
“We will pursue looking at trying to start the administrative portion and collecting fees for registered wells and do some of the functions to see if we can’t generate some revenue as well as look at potential grants and startup money that might be available from the Texas Water Development Board or the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality,” he said.
Scadden said most residential wells will be exempt from fees if the water use is less than 10,000 gallons daily, other than a maximum $40 annual registration fee that will be required of all well owners in order to establish a well’s water flow as a baseline for future studies.
However, the city of West Lake Hills takes exception to being included in the new groundwater district, West Lake Hills Mayor Linda Anthony said.
“We opposed the creation of the district,” she said. “We opposed being included in it because we don’t use groundwater; we use surface water. There are very, very few personal wells in West Lake Hills. I’m not sure there is even a dozen of them. So it didn’t seem reasonable to include us in a district that was going to regulate groundwater when we weren’t going to use it.”
Travis County recently approved $5,000 to the district in startup money, Scadden said.
Hamilton Pool Road Matters, a nonprofit corporation focused on protecting the natural environment in the Hamilton Pool Road area, including the region’s surface and groundwater, donated $3,000 to the district in February, the group’s spokesperson Jim Koerner said.