Council commits funding to protect aquifer
The city will continue funding the Edwards Aquifer Protection Program using its existing funding stream from its water utility, the City Council decided Thursday.
The move comes ahead of two November ballot initiatives that would shift the program’s longtime source of funding, a 1/8-cent sales tax repeatedly approved by San Antonio voters, to pay for a package of economic recovery, education and transportation uses.
To answer objections from the aquifer program’s backers, who fear the proposed loss of sales tax funding, the council voted 9 to 2 Thursday to commit $100 million for up to 10 years for it, with council members Roberto Treviño and Clayton Perry dissenting.
“We are facing an emergency,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg said of the need to redirect the sales tax revenue. “This is an existential threat for many of our neighbors and a pivotal moment for our city’s economy.”
“We can’t abandon our neighbors who need help,” he continued. “Fortunately, we aren’t choosing between the aquifer and our neighbors. We can address the needs of both.”
When the current sales tax expires, it will have generated $325 million since first approved in 2000. The program has set aside more than 160,000 acres so far, to keep new development off areas west of the city where rain recharges the aquifer and to help protect San Antonio’s main source of water from the polluted urban runoff that
comes with cars, pavement, homes and businesses.
The money now will come from San Antonio Water System revenue already earmarked for transfer to the city. Last year, the city boosted the payments it receives from SAWS from 2.7 percent of the utility’s revenue to 4 percent.
At the time, SAWS CEO Robert Puente warned that the move could lead to a water rate hike, and delinquent bills caused by the pandemic-induced recession this year have eaten millions of dollars from the utility’s finances.
But the city’s use of the money for aquifer protection starting in 2022 won’t change the percentage SAWS gives the city, the source of the financial pressure, officials noted. The city’s 4 percent take is not expected to cause a rate increase “in the foreseeable future,” Gavino Ramos, SAWS vice president for communications, said in an email Thursday.
Voters won’t be able to keep the sales tax devoted to aquifer protection but will decide Nov. 3 whether to approve it for workforce training and higher education to help with recovery from the economic fallout caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
A separate ballot measure, which Nirenberg supports, proposes to shift the sales tax to bolster VIA Metropolitan Transit’s hard-hit bus service after the economic recovery program expires in four years.
Voters last approved the aquifer program’s continuation in 2015, and its $100 million in sales tax funding is expected to be reached next spring to carry the program until September 2022. The $100 million in SAWS revenue approved Thursday will start funding aquifer protection in October 2022.
Treviño and Perry, who don’t support the Nov. 3 sales tax initiative and voted against the council’s Aug. 13 decision to place it on the ballot, on Thursday tried to delay the aquifer funding commitment, on the chance that if voters reject the economic recovery package, the sales tax could return to aquifer protection at a later election.
A portion of the 1/8-cent sales tax also funds development of creek-side greenway trails and linear parks in San Antonio. With the future of the greenway trails funding uncertain but guaranteed for the aquifer until 2022, Treviño suggested that the council should “create a better plan when we know what will happen after the November election.”
“You and I agree: This is something we shouldn’t be jumping into,” Perry said in a joint Facebook appearance with Treviño on Wednesday.
Treviño is perhaps the most progressive council member, while Perry is the council’s lone conservative, and the two men normally find themselves on opposite sides of any given vote. But both have been critical of Nirenberg’s workforce proposal and want more money for shorter-term relief.
“I think the mayor is in a rush to get this through before the November election to satisfy the environmentalists and the people that are really concerned about the aquifer,” Perry said Wednesday.