This Thursday, August 26th, is the only chance you’ll get to speak to the Austin City Council on the water rate increases proposed by the Austin Water Utility. The public hearing is in City Hall at Cesar Chavez and Lavaca and starts at 4pm. Come to City Hall and stand up for Austin rate-payers. Sign up for item 86 in the lobby of City Hall. Bring some food, as items with strong public opposition are often taken up later than scheduled.

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Starting in 2004, the Austin City Council has raised residential water rates EVERY YEAR, adding up to over 70% in higher rates, even as water use per person has been going down. Why are they charging us more, with plans to keep raising rates for years to come?

In large part to pay for the boondoggle water treatment plant, the Billion Dollar Mistake on the Lake. That’s right – four City Council Members (including the Mayor, who is the main proponent) want you to pay more to build a water treatment plant that Austin may never need.

The City Council votes on proposed water rate increases, and this year’s will come up for their vote in mid-September. But Thursday, August 26th, is our only chance to speak up against raising rates.

Below, see just how much the Austin City Council has already raised residential water rates and the increases planned for the next several years.

*Proposed (Source: Past city budgets; staff answers to questions on future rates from Council Member Bill Spelman)

- Colin Clark

In a story in the Austin Chronicle (“Best laid plans,” July 16)  about the failure to coordinate regional long-term planning, Katherine Gregor raises Water Treatment Plant 4 as an example of gross planning failure:

Asked for specific examples of the problem, [Kent Butler, director of the graduate pro­gram in community and regional planning at the University of Texas' School of Architecture]  … points to the fact that the city’s Austin Water utility is building an expensive new water treatment plant (Water Treatment Plant No. 4) on Lake Travis – just a jet-ski ride away from where Brushy Creek Regional Utility Authority is building its own, separate new water treatment plant, “all with little or no coordination.” That missed opportunity to work collaboratively translates to big increases in water rates, he said, particularly straining households struggling with poverty (which include 19% of Travis County’s children).

The two projects also reflect burgeoning regional (and statewide) competition for resources, especially water. It’s difficult to get competing communities to collaborate on long-range planning if they (rightly or wrongly) perceive a direct conflict in their interests. The risk, said Butler: “Over time, the cost and reliability of municipal water supplies is likely to become more precious, less secure, and much more expensive.”

This would have been a nice critique to hear made before the city already began pumping money into WTP4 construction.

WTP4 is a bad idea for many reasons – for ratepayers, for neighborhoods, for the environment – and you can add to the list that a complete lack of long-range planning renders it redundant in the big picture with similar, nearby infrastructure because it’s uncoordinated with regional water interests.

- Scott Henson

As a slim 4-3 majority of Austin City Council Members continue to fund the Billion Dollar Mistake on the Lake (aka Water Treatment Plant 4), water use this summer continues to drop. Reduced water use means reduced revenue for the Austin Water Utility, which is already $43 million below projected revenue for 2010.

While temperatures this June were not like last year’s blistering string of triple digit highs, there were 25 days in June with zero rainfall.

Despite the lack of consistent rain and despite the Water Utility’s apparent refusal to promote water conservation to the public when it is needed most (in the summer), Austinites used a lot less water than the Water Utility would like.

So far this summer, the most water we’ve used in one day is 170 million gallons. For perspective, we have the capacity to treat 285 million gallons in one day. When it rained heavily this week, water use dropped to 113 million gallons per day.

This data is relevant for two big reasons. First, the water utility still claims that the Billion Dollar Mistake on the Lake must be in operation to meet projected demand for water in the summer of 2014. Any reading of summer water use from the last two extremely hot and dry summers shows that their projection is wildly off base. We would have to start deliberately wasting water to even come close to needing the additional water treatment that the Mistake on the Lake would provide.

Second, lower water use screws up the water utility’s finances. As the utility asks City Council (and Austin rate-payers) to take on $400 million in debt to pay for the Mistake on the Lake (which balloons to $1.2 billion with interest), lower water sales mean that the utility must raise water rates even more to make debt payments, meet payroll and operation expenses, and kick back money to the City’s general fund. The term “death spiral” comes to mind.

Maybe now it becomes obvious why the water utility is not aggressively promoting the new watering schedule – the less water Austinites use the less money the utility collects.

Thankfully, three City Council Members are standing up for conservation of water and preservation of water rates – Laura Morrison, Bill Spelman, and Chris Riley – by consistently voting against funding for the Mistake on the Lake.

Mayor Lee Leffingwell is the most vocal supporter of the Billion Dollar Mistake on the Lake, which means that Leffingwell, instead of focusing on affordable city services, is supporting a massive water rate increase to pay for an unnecessary boondoggle.

Leffingwell and Council Members Randi Shade, Mike Martinez, and Sheryl Cole also support risking the extinction of a rare and unique local species (the Jollyville Plateau salamander) with a mining operation to build tunnels under the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve to ship water from the Mistake on the Lake to the city’s distribution system. The 8 miles of tunnels ten to twelve feet in diameter could drain the karst limestone of the Bull Creek watershed and dry up springs that are essential to the salamanders’ survival.

Apparently for the Water Treatment Plant Four (Leffingwell, Shade, Martinez, and Cole), making contractors and engineers rich (or richer) is more important than protecting Austin rate-payers and endangered species.

- Colin Clark

On Wednesday, June 9 at the City of Austin Water-Wastewater Commission, join environmental and neighborhood leaders to oppose a massive, fiscally and ecologically irresponsible public works project on the shores of Lake Travis – Water Treatment Plant #4.

WTP4 is a billion-dollar boondoggle to be constructed far outside the City’s Desired Development Zone, with enormous transmission tunnels into the city dug underneath the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve.  The effects will be devastating for the city budget, the environment, and surrounding neighborhoods during the years-long construction process.

Ironically, simple conservation measures that worked well during last year’s drought would put off the need to construct a new water treatment plant for many years to come.

Tell the City:

Halt the Mistake on the Lake!

The Austin City Council soon plans to approve the first construction contracts for WTP4, even though the City has yet to perform necessary environmental assessments or received approval from the US Fish and Wildlife Service to tunnel through potential endangered species habitat. What’s more, the City has not satisfied state law requirements for utility construction on dedicated parkland. Despite these red flags, City Council keeps throwing millions of dollars at the project.

The City must receive approval at next week’s Water-Wastewater Commission meeting to move forward with the issuance of contracts worth $44 million dollars for the construction phase of the project, which are being funded before required assessments and approvals are complete. Come help us convince that body these half-baked plans aren’t ready for primetime.

Join us Wednesday, June 9 at 5:30 at Waller Creek Center at 625 E. 10th Street, 78701 to protest WTP4 and send a clear message that voters want City Council to protect the environment and our pocketbooks.

The Parks Board recently rejected a substantial gift to the city, reported the Austin Chronicle, facing up to “the bigger question [of] whether the city really thinks about long-term costs when approving new park projects.” Parks and Recreation Department director Sara Hensley warned the board, “that her department has $870 million in deferred maintenance,” reported the Chronicle, so “We have to say we can’t build it if we can’t maintain it.”

Austin’s Water Utility is at the same point from a fiscal perspective, but leadership at that agency has chosen the opposite approach: To keep building new infrastructure while failing to maintain what it’s got.

AWU and a bare majority of city council members plan to go into $500 million in debt (totaling $1.2 billion including interest), most of it which the voters never authorized, to construct Water Treatment Plant 4 at a time when the City is losing rougly 11% of water it pumps through leaky pipes that would cost $330 million to fix. And once the plant is constructed, the pipes will still require repair, meaning more debt and yet higher rates (or else just wasting billions of gallons of water per year).

Just as with city parks, where maintenance has been deferred so long that new construction makes no sense, City Council and AWU administrators are faced with a simple choice: Build new infrastructure or maintain what you have. The Parks Department is charting the more prudent path, rejecting new projects to focus resources on maintenance. AWU, on the other hand, will continue to defer maintenance while taking on a half-billion in debt to build new infrastructure outside the Desired Development Zone.

The SOS Alliance doesn’t believe WTP4 is necessary if Austin enacts conservation measures like San Antonio and other water-poor cities around the country. Really, all the City needs to do is meet its own, recently set conservation goals to solve the problem in the near term. But if in a few years capacity is still needed, the City still has the option of taking drinking water from Lady Bird Lake (something that AWU insists remains in its “long-term” plans), a project that would be much cheaper, would fall within the Desired Development Zone, and wouldn’t require drilling miles of tunnels through possible salamander-habitat in cave structures underneath the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve.

As long as the Austin Water Utility is leaking 3.5 billion gallons of water per year into the ground without repairing its leaky pipes, it’s hard to justify adding more water to the system. The Parks Department is beginning to realize that in tight budget times they must focus on maintenance instead of expansion. The City Council and AWU would also do well to apply that philosophy to water policy.

- Scott Henson

Over the weekend the Austin Statesman reported on a nascent endangered species controversy that could implicate Austin’s long-term contract to take drinking water from the Colorado River:

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service may decide by the end of the year whether 11 species of mussels are endangered. If the answer is yes, the state’s river authorities might have to recalculate how much water they can distribute to industry, farmers and growing cities and still leave enough in Texas’ already stressed rivers to keep mussels healthy.

The mussels have colorful names, like the fatmucket , the heelsplitter , the golden orb , the smooth pimpleback and the false spike .

More are found in the basin of the Colorado River, which runs through Austin, than any other part of Texas.

Living as long as 50 years, they are sensitive to water degradation because they act as filters, absorbing harmful impurities along with bacteria and nutrients, like phosphorous.

Since they serve as food for aquatic animals and insects, what they absorb can harm other wildlife as well.

“I think of them as the whole foundation of the aquatic food chain,” said Marsha May, who heads the Mussel Watch program for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Mussels are also vulnerable because they typically attach themselves to a single spot for their entire lives.

An endangered listing could lead to lawsuits between environmental groups, property owners and river authorities, said Bill West, general manager of the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority.

“It would put in doubt all existing water rights heretofore issued by the State of Texas,” West said. …

Wildlife experts say the mussels are the underwater version of the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

“Mussels are often the first species to vanish when environmental conditions change or decline,” state literature on the mussels says. “Healthy mussel populations mean purer water for humans and countless aquatic plants and animals.”

The City of Austin has the largest single contract with the Lower Colorado River Authority to purchase water from the river. So if LCRA oversold the water available and more is needed to maintain mussel populations, there won’t be as much available for Austin’s use, or for that matter other LCRA customers up- and downstream from us.

This news exacerbates trends that were already calling into question old-school water supply models that treat the resource as cheap and infinite. Central Texas’ just-ended drought shows how climate change can fairly rapidly reduce water supplies. Just last year Lake Travis was down 60% at the height of the drought. (For that matter, even though Lake Travis is full now, that’s partially because Lake Buchanan above it remains low – a couple of weeks ago when I visited it was still down 23%). Going forward, any similar water crisis in the future may be heightened by the need to divert more water to endangered crustaceans.

It’s hard to say what the mollusk controversy might mean for Austin, but certainly we have an interest in protecting the mussels if we want “purer water for humans.”  LCRA and the Austin Water Utility have for too long treated the Colorado River as an inexhaustible resource to be mined like gold or copper until the vein runs dry. In the 21st century, though, that approach cannot be sustained. Instead of maximizing water sales, conservation must become the watchword.

Between issues surrounding the mussels, experiences from the recent drought and scientists’ projections of long-term climate change, in all likelihood there will be less water available from the Colorado River in the future than previously projected. In that context, it’s more important than ever to conserve as much as possible instead of maximizing the number of water lines pumping the river dry.

To me, one of the more remarkable aspects of Mistake on the Lake is how the City Council has taken $141 million in bonds approved by voters in 1984 and changed its policies to allow the City to issue up to $580 million in bonds to complete the never-begun project. So voters nearly three decades ago said the City can borrow $141 million, and now that number quadruples without another plebiscite.

Here’s how that works:

When Water Treatment Plant 4 (WTP4) was initially re-considered in the 21st century, years after the original plan had been shelved, “it was determined that additional funding would have to be approved by the City Council and/or the voters of Austin,” according to a document on WTP4 (pdf) prepared for council by the utility. But rather than pony up money from the budget or ask voters to approve more debt, the City Council “approved a change to the Utility’s financial policies that would provide authority for additional funding for voter authorized bond projects that have been deferred significantly and therefore would have insufficient funding due to inflationary impacts.”

How much additional debt did the City authorize themselves to issue? For starters, the City begins its calculation with $190 million, not the $141 million voters approved. That’s because the City’s financial policy makes the “original project cost estimate” the basis for calculation, even though voters approved just a fraction of that full amount. The City then adjusted that project-cost number for inflation, and allowed another 50%, on top of that now-grotesquely ballooned amount to reach the outrageous sum City Council authorized itself to issue. In the case of WTP4:

• Original bond amount: $141.1 million
• Original project cost: $190 million
• Inflationary adjustment (2.03746872): $387.1 million
• Additional authorization via financial policy: 150%
• Total 1984 Proposition 4 Bond Authorization Limit: $580.7 million

(Source: “Austin’s Water Treatment Plant 4 History, Finances and Next Steps,” Austin Water Utility, July 17, 2009)

Et voila! Just like that, the City Council authorized itself to issue $440 million in extra, non-voter approved debt.  No election necessary, no public debate. Just issue four times the amount of debt voters approved without ever checking back with them.

If there’d been a provision on the ballot in 1984 saying, “City Council may increase this amount to $580 million at its discretion” there’s no way it would have passed. (With interest, WTP4 will cost taxpayers around $1.2 billion.)  The project today isn’t even on the same property as the original WTP4, for which the City bought land it later abandoned for these purposes (and now is attempting to sell). Today’s WTP4 has little in common with what voters approved in 1984 except the name and the fact that both would draw water from Lake Travis.

There are plenty of environmental reasons to dislike WTP4: Building outside the Desired Development Zone. Tunneling under the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve. Failing to have the new plant take water from Barton Springs as was promised when the Green plant closed. But it’s fiscal conservatives who arguably have the biggest gripe: In an era when the federal government is wracking up ungodly amounts of debt, the Austin City Council by policy has unfettered WTP4 debt from voter approval, authorizing an ocean of red ink for a plant Austin won’t even need if we just regulate lawn watering in the hottest summer months.

As long as the four councilmembers who authorized this boondoggle stick together, I suppose they just get to do it. But it doesn’t seem right.

- Scott Henson

On Saturday on the Austin Neighborhoods Council listserv, this email from a Northwest Austin neighborhood activist (who asked to be identified as SFB, republished with permission) went out regarding drilling for WTP4 transmission lines:

What is your take on this drilling activity on city Parkland for the Water treatment Plant #4 Jollyville water line?

The city has initiated a Sec. 26 process under the Texas Parks and Wildlife Code.  This process to use parkland for non-park purposes has three steps and the request must be approved at all three steps (Land and Facilities Sub-committee of the Parks Board, the full Parks Board and City Council).  Land and Facilities put a hold on its decision just last Monday evening until more information could be gathered by the Parks Department, Black and Veatch the contractor, and the City Public Works Department.

However, just today the boring trucks drove onto the parkland with big trucks and drilling machines and began to drill 200 or more feet down in the head waters of Bull Creek on city parkland without gaining permission under Sec. 26.

On the parkland no cultural resources have been studied, no affect on springs has been done, the environmental studies are not complete so why are the drilling rigs on parkland, and citizen inquiries are not answered.

It appears that the City of Austin Public Works Department has violated the public trust by not being forthcoming about their activities.

What can our neighborhoods do about this illegal drilling?

What indeed? Save Our Springs Alliance legal director Bill Bunch said the City is likely drilling a test well to look at geology and hydrology, but he doesn’t know whether they secured the necessary permits. Bunch added that “it’s not clear to me how extensive the drilling equipment damage will be or for how long, but if it is more than absolutely minimal they should have gotten some permitting done.”

Bunch thinks the City may have decided to drill after last Monday night’s Parks Board subcommittee, where someone asked if they had done any groundwater testing on the site. First the City said yes; then they backtracked, said they hadn’t, but assured the board that they would.

In any event, says Bunch, “A 4-inch diameter test well won’t tell you much about the potential effects from a 30 to 50 foot diameter vertical shaft any where from 75 to 250 feet deep.”

The Austin City Council today approved a water conservation goal of 140 gallons per capita per day (gpcd) by 2020 which, if achieved, would eliminate the need for Water Treatment Plant #4. Water demand projections showing the need for WTP4 assumed Austinites would use 162 gpcd in 2020. Moving to 140 would be a complete game changer, making the supposed need for the expensive new plant moot.

So why do Mayor Leffingwell and three City Council members believe we need to spend $1.2 billion to build miles-long tunnels from Lake Travis?

To be fair, the Mayor said from the dais he didn’t really believe Austin could reach 140 gcpd and asked staff to assess what “lifestyle changes” would be necessary to reach that goal. (Mainly, the answer is watering yards less.) The rest of the council, though, particularly Chris Riley and Randi Shade, seemed notably more sanguine about prospects for conservation.

The SOS Alliance strongly supports the 140 gpcd goal; we even think the City could get there before 2020. San Antonio is already at 140 gpcd and has set a goal of 115. But achieving it means the Austin Water Utility would sell less water than projected in estimates underlying revenue models that support WTP4. The City Council must choose: Conserve and thus sell less water, or build infrastructure for more water sales. Answering “both,” as the Mayor would have it, only puts off hard decisions until creditors demand their returns. That’s when ratepayers get shafted.

Regrettably, nary a word was (explicitly) mentioned about the incongruity of having committed to spending $1.2 billion on a water plant at Lake Travis while simultaneously adopting conservation goals that make it likely the City can’t pay for the bonds without large rate hikes. No wonder a recent internal audit of the Water Utility found among the highest perceived risk in the utility is managing large projects!

Watching on the Intertubes, the cognitive dissonance seemed palpable, but it will continue until one more City Council Member joins Laura Morrison, Chris Riley, and Bill Spelman to stop the Mistake on the Lake.

- Scott Henson

Here’s a great example from Sarah Coppola at the Austin Statesman demonstrating why it’s foolhardy to extend development further into the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone:

A vandalized sewer line caused a 250,000 gallon wastewater spill in Southwest Austin on Sunday.

Austin Water Utility officials said vandals put orange construction fencing and large rocks in the sewer line. That caused a blockage in the line near the intersection of La Crosse Avenue and South MoPac Boulevard (Loop 1). The spill entered a creek that feeds the Barton Springs segment of the Edwards Aquifer.

The utility is asking Sunset Valley residents and people in the area who use private wells to boil their water for the time being. And the Parks and Recreation Department has closed Barton Springs Pool to further test the water. Officials estimate that the spill could reach the pool and the headwaters of Barton Creek in 72 hours. has closed

Water utility crews have cleaned up 50 percent of the spill and are continuing that work today, city officials said.

Before the City Council voted to close the Green water treatment plant in 2008 to build condominiums, the water flowing into Barton Springs and Lady Bird Lake was actually drinking water and the City had much greater incentives to prevent and/or quickly respond to such situations. Now the City has less immediate incentive to protect southwestern creeks and the recharge zone.

Building a water treatment plant on Lake Travis arguably cements those interests for the long-term, ensuring that the City will never have to protect water quality in Lady Bird Lake as vigilantly as they would if the City continued to draw its drinking water from it.

More than four decades ago, Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book Silent Spring included a chapter on Town Lake water quality and thereafter it took decades to get to the point (in 1999) where the public could once again eat fish caught in that portion of the river. But that was when Town Lake was our drinking water and since then more has changed than the name of the body of water. We don’t draw tap water from Lady Bird Lake anymore, and there’s a risk incidents like this one won’t attract the same level of attention or focus on prevention as they would have in the past when they affected water coming from the tap.

Ironically, the City is now saying there are homeland security concerns with only having water intake in Lake Austin, but one can’t help wonder where was the Austin Water Utility’s concern for security and water quality when they recently took the Green treatment plant offline?

- Scott Henson