Medina Lake to Be Considered as a Water Source

The 14 cities and water supply corporations near here that make up the South Texas Regional Water Alliance are pinning hopes for future water supplies on improvements to nearby Medina Lake.

On Monday the group was cheered by authorization from the Texas Water Development Board to fund a study to examine how to store water in lakes on the canal system near Medina Lake or underground, injected into an aquifer, said Steve Raabe of the San Antonio River Authority.

“It's really looking at something that nobody has ever looked at before,” Raabe said, adding that Medina Lake water enters the Edwards Aquifer and other underground rock formations, giving the lake a tendency to go dry during droughts. “What is going to be studied is whether you can take a supply of water out of Medina Lake, which has some concerns of reliability, and add some additional storage,” he said.

The water alliance, formed about a year ago, sees the study as long-term insurance, said its president Joe Kierstead, who is also president of Atascosa Rural Water Supply Corp. “It's not just a water issue for tomorrow, it's a water issue for the next 25, 30 years,” he said.

The plan for alliance members, who are evenly split between entities that get their water from the Edwards and Carrizo aquifers, is to eventually form the South Texas Regional Water Alliance Water Supply Corp. to serve as a water wholesaler, Kierstead said. The alliance now includes the cities of Lytle, Natalia, Pleasanton, Poteet, Castroville, Charlotte and LaCoste, as well as several existing water supply corporations.

The new, bigger water supply corporation would contract to buy water from one of its members, the Bexar Metropolitan Water District, which currently holds permits for almost 20,000 acre-feet of Medina Lake water, Kierstead said.

Because BexarMet does not use all its water to serve its customers, other communities in South Texas might, although Kierstead said the exact future role of the alliance has yet to be worked out.

This is where the Medina Lake study kicks in, said Humberto Ramos, assistant director of water resources at BexarMet, which also holds 11,000 acre-feet of permits in Medina River water. Ramos admitted that the district's Medina Lake water permit hasn't always been reliable in dry years. But if the study finds ways to store additional water in or around Medina Lake, then BexarMet hopes to sell to the alliance any that's left over after it serves its own customers.

Lytle Mayor Pro-tem Jerry Stone said the study's approval was a step forward but not a complete solution. “Most of the towns around here barely have enough money to pay their bills,” Stone said. “As the population and industry grows in San Antonio we fear that the small towns will be left with no water.”

Raabe said no decisions have been made on who will conduct the study, which he hopes will be complete by the spring of 2010.

Trey Wilson is a lawyer in San Antonio, Texas. His law practice focuses on real estate and water-related litigation.