TX: No new dumping in Highland lakes

VILLAGE OF VOLENTE, Texas (KXAN/AP) - The cities of Leander and Granite Shoals lost their fight to lift the two-decade-old ban on pumping additional treated wastewater back into the string of Highland Lakes.

This morning, three-member Texas Commission on Environmental Quality declined to reverse the ban, which was supported in a petition filed by Granite Shoals and Leander.

While the idea of pumping treated wastewater back into a freshwater lake leaves most people to conjure up a picture of unsightly sewage in a drinking water source, treated wastewater often is as clean as lake water.

The real issue that stakeholders like the Lower Colorado River Authority had with the idea was not that the water was “unclean,” but that it did not have the proper balance of nutrients that would be capable of discouraging the growth of algae.

Granite Shoals Mayor Frank Reilly expressed regret at the choice. He noted that four existing wastewater plants already discharge treated effluent back into the Highland Lakes because they existed before the ban was created.

“It is an absolute waste of a valuable natural resource to have to use our treated water to spray it on cedar trees, which is what we and other communities along the Highland Lakes are forced to do,” Reilly said. “What the cities both wanted to do was to discharge into the tributaries any treated water that we didn’t use, which was not going to be a significant amount of water.”

The ultimate cost to Granite Shoals, Reilly said, is that the city will be forced to pony up the cost of a wastewater treatment plant. For a city of only 5,000, that $4 million price tag on a plant is a big one, and an expense Reilly labeled as wasteful.

Even though the three-member commission rejected the Leander/Granite Shoals petition after opposition from the agency’s executive director and local community leaders, commissioners Buddy Garcia, Carlos Rubinstein and Bryan Shaw, in turn, each left the door open for future reconsideration of the issue.

The commissioners took terms discussing the advancements in water treatment, the fact that treatment of wastewater left it as “clean” as lake water and noted the possibility that future breakthroughs could provide a more balanced nutrient level and better testing methods to determine if issues such as prescription drugs in the lake water were really issues created by released effluent.

The executive director’s recommendation was to create a stakeholders group to consider the issue of releasing treated water back into the lake. The commissioners declined to back that recommendation but indicated that a discussion of nutrient levels on lakes across the state could lead to additional discussion.