After years of regulatory filings, public hearings and political strain, the proposed Guajolote Ranch improvement — a 2,900-home undertaking with a brand new wastewater remedy plant in northwest Bexar County — is approaching a important level.
State regulators face a Dec. 22 deadline to resolve whether or not they may rethink the undertaking’s wastewater discharge allow, whereas San Antonio officers put together to overview a brand new petition to create a municipal utility district that might finance the event’s infrastructure by larger property tax charges.
The 2 selections — one on the Texas Fee on Environmental High quality and one at Metropolis Corridor — will decide whether or not the undertaking strikes ahead with development projected to start early subsequent yr or enters one more spherical of authorized and procedural challenges.
On Oct. 22, the TCEQ accepted a allow permitting Municipal Operations LLC, the wastewater operator for Lennar Corp., the house developer behind Guajolote Ranch, to discharge as much as 1 million gallons of handled effluent or wastewater per day right into a dry creek mattress upstream from the headwaters of Helotes Creek, which circulation into the Edwards Aquifer recharge and contributing zones. That allow additionally permits as much as 4 million gallons of handled effluent to be dumped into the creek mattress on peak days.
Quickly after, opponents of the undertaking filed a 115-page movement for rehearing with TCEQ; on the time of publication they haven’t acquired a response.
Guajolote Ranch has turn out to be the main focus of the long-running dispute. Opponents argue the allow fails to account for the way water strikes underground on this a part of northwest Bexar County, the place the Helotes Creek watershed sits atop fractured karst limestone, permitting water — and something dissolved in it — to maneuver quickly underground. The realm is part of the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone.
Though these considerations heart on how pollution may transfer underground, the TCEQ allow doesn’t consider groundwater pathways. Below Texas regulation, wastewater discharge permits are evaluated beneath surface-water high quality requirements and don’t require evaluation of groundwater circulation or subsurface transport.
For residents who stay alongside the hall, that omission feels deeply private. Many depend on shallow Trinity Aquifer wells and say the world’s hydrology makes it uniquely susceptible.
On Wednesday, members of the Scenic Loop–Helotes Creek Alliance walked the dry draw straight downstream from the discharge level. Many households have lived alongside the hall for generations and say turning a usually dry channel right into a wastewater outlet may completely alter each the panorama and the groundwater that they rely upon.
“That is nothing greater than a runoff,” stated Lynette Toepperwein Munson, who says her household has lived on adjoining land for greater than 140 years. “If it rains, you’ll see the runoff. As soon as the runoff is completed, this creek is dry. There’s by no means been lively water over right here.”
Munson stated many neighboring properties depend on shallow wells in a extremely fractured, porous karst surroundings the place water, and something dissolved in it, can transfer quickly underground.
“We’re on wells out right here. A few of them aren’t very deep. Mine’s lower than 300 toes — I’ve no filtration,” she stated. “I don’t even have the limestone and sand layers that among the deeper wells have. As a result of mine’s so shallow, any groundwater leaching, stuff like that, goes to go straight into my pool before later.”
Throughout heavy rain, residents say the creek mattress can shift from dry to flowing inside minutes earlier than draining again underground simply as shortly — a sample in keeping with speedy recharge circumstances.
Her worries replicate a broader scientific debate that has hovered over the undertaking since its preliminary phases in 2019: whether or not discharged wastewater on this a part of the Edwards Aquifer contributing zone can transfer by the fractured limestone beneath the creek mattress and attain the Edwards Aquifer — the first drinking-water supply for greater than 2 million folks and the supply for almost 50% of the water utilized by San Antonio Water Programs (SAWS).
Opponents of the event, which was proposed in 2021, ceaselessly level to a 2020 research performed by the Southwest Analysis Institute to guage the affect of wastewater programs on Edwards Aquifer. Within the press launch for the research Dr. Ronald Inexperienced, SwRI technical advisor and undertaking supervisor, states that the outcomes, “predicted that putting in extra wastewater programs within the area, no matter kind, would enhance the quantity of wastewater discharged to the surroundings and considerably degrade the watershed and the standard of water recharging the Edwards Aquifer.”
On Thursday, officers reviewed a Council Consideration Request on the Metropolis Council’s Governance Committee on the event’s water contract and the company’s evaluation of dangers to the aquifer.
SAWS senior vp Donovan Burton advised council members the utility believes “lots of the dangers have been considerably mitigated” by phrases negotiated into the water service contract.
“We don’t see a big risk to the aquifer. Definitely, we’re not going to say that there can’t be any water in any respect [that] will get into the Edwards aquifer, and any water is regarding. To some extent,” he stated. “We’re required to offer good, pure ingesting water to our clients, and at this level we don’t see a big risk from this specific improvement because it stands immediately.”
When questioned by Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones over the findings of the SwRI research, Burton cited main variations in what SAWS sees and what the research experiences, together with the mapping of the underground geology of the aquifers on the Haby fault.
Burton stated the world the place water may presumably enter could be within the higher Trinity aquifer earlier than going by the fault, if the water did transfer by the Haby fault it might go into “a really dense space of the Edwards Aquifer.”
”I’m making an attempt to keep away from talking in blanket. I can’t say that there received’t be a drop once more that would recover from there,” he stated.” However we expect largely that that water won’t cross into the Haby fault, by that dense layer of Edwards to get into that space.”
Burton additionally addressed dye-tracer work that he stated was used within the SwRI research.
“That was executed at a time the place the actual nicely that they put dye hint into was drilled into each formations, the Trinity and the Edwards Aquifer, and so there was dye present in each of those aquifers. They assumed they had been mixing, however really they weren’t blocked off,” he stated. “they had been [later] blocked off from the assorted layers, and in order that water going into the nicely wouldn’t give into each aquifers.”
Opponents of the undertaking dispute that interpretation. In a number of filings — together with the rehearing request submitted final month — the Higher Edwards Aquifer Alliance, the Metropolis of Gray Forest, the Scenic Loop–Helotes Creek Alliance and State Sen. Donna Campbell (R–New Braunfels) level to the SwRI research and different hydrological analysis as proof that the subsurface beneath Helotes Creek is extra interconnected than SAWS contends.
Campbell, whose Senate district consists of the proposed improvement, wrote in a Dec. 2 letter supporting the rehearing request that the SwRI findings “haven’t been refuted,” citing what she described as “well-documented hydrological connectivity between the Trinity Glen Rose and Edwards aquifers.”
On the bottom, Munson echoed that sentiment as considered one of her greatest frustrations that she continues to cope with as proceedings unfold.
“I don’t have an ideal reply, as a result of no one’s given us an ideal reply, why are we discounting the science. The Metropolis of San Antonio commissioned that research from Southwest Analysis. So why, swiftly, is the science now not good? It was good 5 years in the past and it was a two-year research,” she stated. “There’s anyone up there saying, ‘Nope, it’s not going to do that.’ Properly, the place’s the science? We have now the science that claims, don’t do that.”
Past questions on groundwater motion, opponents have additionally raised considerations about how wastewater crops function in observe — pointing to compliance data they are saying undercut claims that the proposed services pose little threat.
In an Oct. 19 interview on The Supply on Texas Public Radio, David Grove, Lennar’s regional president for Texas, stated there are already wastewater remedy crops working “safely and successfully immediately inside the contributing zone” of the Edwards Aquifer, the place Guajolote Ranch is positioned.
Members of the Scenic Loop–Helotes Creek Alliance reviewed federal Enforcement and Compliance Historical past On-line (ECHO) data maintained by the U.S. Environmental Safety Company for wastewater remedy crops within the contributing zone that Lennar and its representatives have cited as examples. The San Antonio Report independently verified these data.
Of the 14 services for which EPA compliance knowledge was accessible, seven had not less than one quarter inside the previous three reporting years categorised as “violations recognized” beneath the federal Clear Water Act, based on the ECHO database.
The documented violations included exceeding the quantity of pollution — E. coli, ammonia, nitrogen, phosphorus and complete suspended solids — that opponents argue carry heightened threat in areas the place floor water can quickly transfer underground.
Opponents additionally level to SAWS personal regulatory historical past as proof that compliance points will not be hypothetical. In 2013, the U.S. Division of Justice and the Environmental Safety Company reached a settlement with SAWS over Clear Water $1.1 billion in system upgrades and to pay a $2.6 million civil penalty.
The grievance alleged that between 2006 and 2012, SAWS had roughly 2,200 unlawful overflows from its sanitary sewer system that discharged roughly 23 million gallons of uncooked sewage into native waterways in violation of its CWA discharge allow.
Michael Phillips, a council member for the Metropolis of Gray Forest, which sits downstream from the proposed improvement, stated the settlement and grievance in opposition to SAWS conjures up little confidence of their promise of mitigating dangers.
“For them to say, ‘don’t fear, this isn’t going to be an enormous deal.’ It’s laughable,” Phillips stated.
Because the Dec. 22 deadline for the Texas Fee on Environmental High quality to grant a rehearing or enable the wastewater allow to face approaches, a separate decision-making course of is unfolding at Metropolis Corridor.
Though Guajolote Ranch lies outdoors of San Antonio’s metropolis limits, the undertaking is positioned inside the metropolis’s extraterritorial jurisdiction, or ETJ, which is the unincorporated land surrounding town the place San Antonio has restricted authority over improvement that would have an effect on public companies, infrastructure and environmental high quality inside metropolis boundaries.
That authority now locations the undertaking earlier than the council.
In November, the developer submitted a petition in search of town’s consent to create a municipal utility district, or MUD, to finance infrastructure for the event, together with the wastewater remedy plant. MUDs are special-purpose governmental entities that may difficulty bonds to pay for infrastructure, with the debt repaid by larger property taxes assessed on future residents inside the district.
Below state regulation, town has 90 days to behave on the petition. Metropolis employees advised council members this week on the governance assembly that the merchandise have to be thought of by early February, with a tentative council vote scheduled for Feb. 5.
If Metropolis Council approves the petition, the MUD would transfer ahead to extra state approvals. If town denies the request or takes no motion, the developer may search various service preparations or pursue approval by the state — probably triggering one other spherical of negotiations or authorized challenges.
At a Nov. 25 Southern Edwards Plateau Habitat Conservation Plan Coordinating Committee assembly, a consultant from Lennar Corps. advised committee members they plan to start clearing land for the primary part of improvement in January or February.
In the meantime, Philips stated the alliance is ready to take the allow to the Travis County district courts if the rehearing request just isn’t accepted.
“As soon as that date passes, in the event that they then say ‘growth, that’s the ultimate say on the matter,’ then that’s our sign to file a movement within the district courts.”
