San Antonio Express-News
Small aquifers seen playing big future role
November 30, 2013
BOERNE
— Even after the current drought breaks — whenever that might be —
every bit of available groundwater could be needed to meet future
demands in fast-growing Kendall County, Cow Creek Groundwater
Conservation District directors say.
That's
why they want the area's smaller aquifers included in a regional
planning group's efforts to quantify current and future groundwater
supplies.
The
computations for a statewide water plan are being prepared by 16
regional groups, including the Groundwater Management Area 9 Joint
Planning Committee, which include all or parts of Bandera, Bexar,
Blanco, Comal, Hays, Kendall, Kerr, Medina and Travis counties.
“In
20 years, every drop is going to be relevant. So we'd rather establish a
framework to track all of the small aquifers in our region,” said Micah
Voulgaris, manager of the Cow Creek district, which covers Kendall
County.
Several
who attended a Nov. 18 meeting of the GMA 9 panel also spoke against a
proposal to declare the Ellenburger, Hickory, Marble Falls and Upper
Glen Rose aquifers “nonrelevant” for regional planning purposes.
That
classification is favored by some board members who said it wouldn't be
worth the work to include the smaller formations under a legislative
mandate to develop detailed data on relevant aquifers' current
conditions and future demands.
“We
don't have to waste our time dealing with it,” Ron Fieseler, committee
chairman and manager of the Blanco-Pedernales Groundwater Conservation
District, said at the meeting.
He
wants to focus efforts on the Trinity Aquifer, the main water supply in
the district, and said the smaller aquifers aren't widely used because
they're deeper and, therefore, more costly to access.
Fieseler
said categorizing the smaller ones as relevant would require holding
public hearings, filing reports and drafting a projection for each,
called its “Desired Future Condition,” or DFC, which reflects water
availability and anticipated drawdown through 2060 — when Kendall
County's population, now about 34,000, is forecast to be nearly 100,000.
“Just
because it's nonrelevant doesn't mean the (local) groundwater
conservation district gives up its authority to manage it,” said Brian
Hunt of the Barton Springs-Edwards Aquifer Conservation District.
Voulgaris
offered to have the Cow Creek district handle all the necessary
paperwork for the smaller aquifers, saying: “We've got a lot of water in
these that we don't know of.”
A
decision on how to designate the small aquifers was tabled after
Fieseler offered to hold further talks with Cow Creek directors.
Tommy
Mathews, chairman of the Cow Creek board, later said it would be
foolish for regional water planners to forego examining the smaller
aquifers just because the process is difficult and expensive.
“If
we abdicate that responsibility ... then the state water planners will
be free to use any (water availability) numbers they want, and we give
up our say,” he said.
Besides
updating its DFCs, a new state initiative calls for the regional groups
to calculate the “total estimated recoverable storage” volume for each
aquifer in their jurisdictions.
The new requirement comes as the agency overseeing the planning effort, the Texas Water Development Board, is in transition.
The
Legislature just restructured the agency's board from six part-time
directors to three full-time directors in conjunction with Proposition
6, a statewide referendum approved by voters Nov. 5, which will provide a
$2 billion infusion of cash from the state's rainy day fund to finance
water projects.
“There's a lot of change going on,” Rima Petrossian, an agency staffer, told the GMA 9 board at its meeting here.
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