Monday Musings #44: Texas: The Anti-Science State

Texas has long been an anti-science state, one where state elected leaders cling to the 19th-century past and keep their heads planted in the soil rather than accept responsibility for governing smartly in the 21st century.

There is no better example than the state’s record of water management, although it would be incorrect to assume the state manages its water resources. It doesn’t. Texas relies on a web of local water districts, which range from major urban water utilities to rural groundwater districts that act largely in the interests of ranching and farming.

Texas, of course, still treats groundwater and surface water like two different natural resources with no visible, and therefore, no real connection. Huh? Yes, the way pioneers in the state saw it, literally, surface water, which moves in rivers, creeks, and estuaries, is a public resource. Groundwater, which it could not see or measure, was and still is treated as private property. Landowners are free to exploit the resource as they see fit, with very few limitations.

Of course, we now know groundwater is also a moving resource, and that the Edwards Aquifer, to cite the region’s most important and precious resource, is recharged by surface water infiltrating the porous limestone below the Central and South Texas soil. Spring-fed rivers and creeks, in turn, see their surface water replenished by healthy groundwater deposits.

Don’t tell that to state legislators or the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), overseen by political appointees beholden to industrial and business interests, with little interest in protecting the environment or limiting development in the interest of protecting sensitive underground water formations.

Texas would be far better off if the governor, lieutenant governor, and House speaker would pause their partisan agendas and focus on the state’s long-term well-being. They could start with a constitutional amendment that declares surface and groundwater one and the same, and end the long practice of allowing property owners to selfishly claim groundwater as a privately-held asset.

The discharge of treated wastewater into creeks and creekbeds coursing through undeveloped rural properties located over sensitive recharge formations is not in the public interest, but after years of contentious debate, the proposed building of nearly 3,000 residential units in the Guajolote Ranch development is coming to a head and will be decided soon.

I encourage you to read reporter Diego Medel’s Dec. 14 article in the San Antonio Report on the project and its disturbing wastewater discharge plans. He included links for readers unfamiliar with the years of back-and-forth to familiarize themselves with the history of the project, the TCEQ’s apparent approval and the significant public opposition. Here is a brief excerpt:

On Oct. 22, the TCEQ approved a permit allowing Municipal Operations LLC, the wastewater operator for Lennar Corp., the home developer behind Guajolote Ranch, to discharge up to 1 million gallons of treated effluent or wastewater per day into a dry creek bed upstream from the headwaters of Helotes Creek, which flow into the Edwards Aquifer recharge and contributing zones. That permit also allows up to 4 million gallons of treated effluent to be dumped into the creek bed on peak days.

Soon after, opponents of the project filed a 115-page motion for rehearing with TCEQ; at the time of publication, they have not received a response. 

Guajolote Ranch has become the focus of the long-running dispute. Opponents argue the permit fails to account for how water moves underground in this part of northwest Bexar County, where the Helotes Creek watershed sits atop fractured karst limestone, allowing water — and anything dissolved in it — to move rapidly underground. The area is a part of the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone.

The TCEQ permit fails to address the potential pollution of the Edwards Aquifer because it does not speak to the flow of groundwater. Under archaic Texas law, wastewater discharge permits are considered based only on how the discharges will affect surface water bodies. It’s that anti-science culture in the state that exasperates opponents: How can state officials ignore the obvious?

The answer: They do it all the time, and in doing so, can cite the law in their defense. And as long as we cling to laws passed long before science established clear geological and environmental understandings of how water moves and is stored underground, and how surface water policies affect the quality of underground water supplies.

The 1,160-acre Guajolote Ranch is located in Northwest Bexar County, about one mile north of Scenic Loop and Babcock Road, which places it outside the city limits of San Antonio within its Extra Territorial Jurisdiction, which gives City Council limited say on the proposed development and the creation of an associated water district. It will be interesting to watch this matter play out both in Austin and at City Hall.

San Antonio’s two biggest challenges to a more prosperous future are its persistent poverty levels and its uncontrolled sprawl, which adds hundreds of millions of dollars in new infrastructure costs to the city’s five-year capital spending cycles. We will never catch up as a city as long as developers are allowed to move forward with projects well outside the urban core that continue to convert ranchlands and other undeveloped properties over the recharge zone into increasingly distant cookie-cutter suburbs that eventually demand city-level infrastructure and services.

It’s a self-defeating cycle for a city that hopes to become a better version of itself.