City voices protest of water project
By SHANNON CRABTREE scrabtree@leader-news.com

El Campo City Council unanimously accepted a resolution Tuesday night protesting the Lower Colorado River Authority's plan to pipe and sell water to San Antonio.

The anti-SAWS or San Antonio Water Service project resolution joins one Wharton County Commissioners Court approved last year.

Precinct 3 Commissioner Philip Miller had appeared before city leaders Nov. 24 asking them to consider taking a stance against the water plan.

"There's some pretension that this does not affect us," Miller told Council at that meeting. "Most of the wells will not be drilled in Wharton County, but they will affect our aquifer."

The LCRA-SAWS Water Project proposes to reduce demand for water for irrigated agriculture and to produce more groundwater for use by farmers in Colorado, Wharton and Matagorda counties. The project also proposes building a 4,200 acre holding basin on the Pierce Ranch to capture and store water from rainfall and from upstream sources.

Those flows, estimated at 150,000 acre feet, would later be transported via pipeline to San Antonio.

The LCRA is still studying the potential fallout of the plan. That study period is scheduled to end no later than 2015.

Wharton County had earlier identified several areas of concern regarding the impact the project will have on the river. Commissioners also objected to the drilling of groundwater wells as a substitute for using surface water for irrigation.

Tuesday City Council agreed.

"The City Council of the city of El Campo objects to the proposed plan to drill over 70 groundwater wells, that would be controlled by LCRA in the lower three counties," the resolution reads.

It adds the city "does not approve of the taking away of underground water supplies that would be detrimental to the area agriculture concerns" and "does not approve of the taking of land by LCRA from unwilling property owners for any use in this project; whether it is for a potential reservoir or a well site."