CG: Pretty ugly legal fight between Austin and San Antonio taking place. Both Austin and SA are still growing, both are in severe drought, both are looking for water.
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San Antonio Water System sues LCRA over water-sharing agreement
System asks for $1.23 billion in damages; LCRA says it was acting responsibly.
By Asher Price
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
The San Antonio Water System filed suit Monday against the Lower Colorado River Authority for $1.23 billion after the implosion of a massive water-sharing deal months ago.
The suit, filed in Travis County District Court, accuses the LCRA of a breach of contract that deprived San Antonio of water. The suit claims the river authority killed the project to keep water in its basin for lucrative power plant deals.
The LCRA denies the claims.
"LCRA is disappointed that SAWS — rather than face facts — is spending ratepayer money on a meritless lawsuit," Tom Mason, the LCRA's general manager, said in a statement.
The project would have sent water from the Colorado River to San Antonio for 80 years; in return, the Colorado River basin would have received money to pay for long-term storage projects and conservation programs.
But in April, after several years of planning studies, the LCRA pulled the plug on the deal, saying it did not have enough water in its basin to ship to San Antonio. The San Antonio system claimed the LCRA was in breach of contract and, after mediation fell through this month, decided to go after the river authority.
At the least, the suit highlights how valuable a commodity water has become as areas of Texas jockey for the resource.
San Antonio has long looked for an alternative source of water to the Edwards Aquifer, but, one after another, proposed water projects have fallen flat, ratcheting up political pressure on the public water utility to find one that works.
The LCRA, meanwhile, has begun examining ways to boost its long-term water supplies as it tries to meet the demands of booming cities and new industries in its basin.
In the suit, San Antonio asks for the amount it claims is the difference between the estimated project cost and the total cost of acquiring the same amount of water from another source — $1.23 billion, according to the San Antonio Water System's estimates.
The math is based on San Antonio estimates of getting the same amount of water from the water-sharing deal over the same period through a desalination plant; officials with the San Antonio Water System estimate the cost of their water would jump from $2.3 billion to more than $3.5 billion.
"Not only has LCRA decided not to honor its promises," says the suit, "it has decided that it will keep the studies and plans that SAWS paid over $40 million to complete; keep the benefit of thousands of man hours that SAWS provided to the project; and require San Antonio to find another source of water to make up for the 90,000 to 115,000 acre-feet it would have received every year if LCRA had kept its promises."
An acre-foot is roughly equal to the amount of water required to cover a football field 1 foot deep. When full, lakes Travis and Buchanan, the main drinking reservoirs for Central Texas, hold just over 2 million acre-feet.
Under the terms of the agreement, the Colorado River basin would have had a net increase of 180,000 acre-feet of water per year through increased storage and conservation, and San Antonio would have gotten enough water to reduce its reliance on the Edwards Aquifer, according to the suit.
The agreement was once "hailed as a shining model of how local governments could cooperate to solve their common problems," according to the suit. "However, LCRA's motives were not so altruistic."
The suit claims that the LCRA entered into the agreement to pre-empt legislative meddling in its affairs and, once that threat passed, bowed to lucrative power plant opportunities in Matagorda County, in the lower part of the Colorado River basin.
There was "a clear intent by some board members to kill the SAWS project so that the power industry in Matagorda County could expand," the suit claims.
In response, the LCRA said it acted responsibly when it said new demand projections in its basin meant the project could not go forward.
"At a time when Colorado River water users like those in Austin are taking unprecedented steps to cut back their use in response to extreme drought, it is perplexing that San Antonio officials are claiming that they are en led to water from the Colorado River," Mason said. "The study results show there isn't enough water to meet requirements for both regions."
He said the feasibility studies showed that San Antonio's claims that the proposed project would mean extra water in the Highland Lakes during drought were "patently false."
In 2002, the river authority and the San Antonio Water System signed a contract to study the feasibility of a water-sharing project that could meet water needs in both agencies' river basins. As long as the studies showed that the project would meet certain legislative requirements, such as keeping up lake levels in the Highland Lakes or maintaining enough water to satisfy environmental needs in the lower part of the Colorado River, the two utilities would move forward.
But calculations by the river authority released late last year suggested that water demands in the Colorado River basin in coming decades could be as much as 25 percent more than previously estimated.
The numbers reflected the migration of factories and people into the lower Colorado River basin. Already, the LCRA is committed to water contracts providing as much as 165 billion gallons a year, even in times of drought. Its two main reservoirs, Lake Travis and Lake Buchanan, can supply up to 145 billion gallons of water a year.
"What will be in dispute is whether those (population and demand) figures are really bona fide, and a justifiable basis for canceling the agreement," said Ronald Kaiser, a professor of water law and policy at Texas A&M University.
Water fight
The dispute between the LCRA and the San Antonio Water System:
Whether the project would be feasible:
San Antonio says legislatively mandated studies showed the project could work. The LCRA says its own updated population and demand projections showed that it could not.
The motivation for the LCRA pulling the plug on the project:
The LCRA says it withdrew from the project because of the hard demographic and demand projections. San Antonio says the numbers were a pretext for a policy change.
Dollars and cents:
The LCRA says that at most it owes San Antonio half the costs of the feasibility studies, or about $20 million. San Antonio says the LCRA broke the contract and owes it $1.23 billion.
[email protected]; 445-3643
http://www.statesman.com/news/conten.../0825saws.html
Blue Gold, the next "war", and it's coming soon.
Some significant agricultural areas of California are turning back into desert and dust bowl land.
But nobody do anything, just keep consuming and wasting resources as if they were infinite.
CPS's nuclear plans seem to ignore the need for cooling water.
As with any speculative report, there can be no way of knowing what is going to actually happen in future events such as weather and/or population expansion.
I'm not privy to the details of this agreement between LCRA and SAWS...but it should serve as a reminder that any one en y should not be coexistant based on another.
The city of San Antonio has had numerous water capturing proposals voted down that would have kept the supplies of this storage within the bounderies and control of the city.
As of now...Bexar county is sharing with Comal county regarding the Corizo/Wilcox aquifer. It's only a matter of time before litigation will present itself as the population expands between the two.
It's going to be pretty ugly. Whoever loses this lawsuit is really going to have to stick it to their customers in terms of higher water bills. Even then it's still just a matter of time before Austin & SA have to start pumping desalinized gulf water up from the coast.
"pumping desalinized gulf water"
what do you do with the brine?
and where do you get the energy for desalination?
You dump the brine back into the gulf and the desalinization facility operator gets his power from the grid like any other industrial use customer. It's an expensive solution, but it's inveitable. Conservation efforts alone aren't going to solve the problems long term. The population growth in Aus/SA is just going to continue.
About 10 years ago we were mirred in another bad ass drought. I recall one of the water experts stating then that about 60% of the water used by SAWS customers went to watering yards.
Perhaps when people finally realize the days of watering huge yards of St. Augustine carpet grass are over and retro fit their yards to native grass or bermuda hybrids or going xeriscape, then we can get serious on water.
Afterall, St. Augustine grass is not even native to S. Texas. It came from the savannahs of Africa.
I also read hot-month lawn watering was about 50% of SAWS customers' consumption.
Flying to Laredo or Phoenix, the "lawns" look like brown dirt.
most definately true.Blue Gold, the next "war", and it's coming soon.
"You dump the brine back into the gulf"
Brine disposal is actually a serious problem with seawater desalination, not the glib solution you state. Lots of info, here's a good summary of what Australia is doing:
http://waterrecycling.blogspot.com/2...-disposal.html
I expect SA and Austin will have sewage water reclamation plants like Orange County CA. The water coming out of that plant is pumped back into the aquifer because people haven't accepted drinking (yet). The water is "filtered" by the earth, emerging worse quality than the reclaimed water that was pumped in, requiring further processing.
It was no more my intention to be glib about dumping brine back into the gulf than it was yours to be glib by suggesting that you can just take water coming out of wastewater treatment plants and pump them directly back into aquifers. Obviously anything you do is going to require years worth of environmental studies and multiple permits from various state and federal agencies. I didn't think going into details about how one disposes of brine added anything to my point, but if you'd like to have a more in depth conversation about it, I'm game.
Interesting link btw.
"yours to be glib by suggesting that you can just take water coming out of wastewater treatment plants and pump them directly back into aquifers."
that is exactly what Orange County is doing, so glibly GFY.
Damn orange county. I'll bet it's the fault of those repugs, evil corporations and the magik negro.
Ironically if Austin and other LCRA customers used as little water as San Antonio, there'd probably be plenty of water to go around. There was even a recent article in the Austin paper saying Austin should learn from San Antonio:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/con...lips_edit.html
LCRA is flushing hundreds of thousands of acre feet down the Colorado so some rice farmers WAY downstream can keep their crops flooded and to generate hydroelectric power. Those are uses that are incompatible with the demands of this area and represent why the Highland Lakes are in such decline during this drought.
But the Sierra club is happy, the little fish have water. And unemployment
is just great and getting greater. Soon no one in California will have a job.
And we will be paying through the nose for veggies.
But on the bright side. Vegitarians gotta suffer right along with us.
Farmers have legal rights to water just like municipalities do, so it's not as simple as just telling the farmers that they're going to have their supply cut off.
As for Austin, yes, Austin has been spoiled by having an abundant water supply readily available and as a result they don't have the conservation discipline that San Antonio does.
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