City Council approves water conservation plans, for now

As expected, City Council endorsed new Water Conservation and Drought Contingency plan updates at its Thursday meeting, voting unanimously to send them along to the state – despite major misgivings from key stakeholders who say the plans don’t do enough to conserve water.

Both plans approved Thursday regulate how customers can use water in Austin. The conservation plan sets a standard for how water is consumed and conserved in the city year-round. The drought contingency plan goes into effect during times of drought, setting rules about drought stages, emergencies and restrictions on water use. 

Council voted unanimously to adopt the plans ahead of a Texas Commission on Environmental Quality deadline this month. However, at Tuesday’s work session, Anna Bryan-Borja, Austin Water’s assistant director of business services, confirmed that the approved plans were “not the end of the story.” She explained to Council that the water utility was in conversation with the Water Forward Task Force and was preparing to update that plan this summer. 

“Updates to the water conservation plan go hand in hand with updates to the Water Forward plan. So we want to bring (them) back to Council in November,” Bryan-Borja said. “Council will have the opportunity to adopt those updated plans and we will resubmit them to the state.”

At Thursday’s meeting, Austin Water Director Shay Ralls Roalson stressed that the utility is committed to water conservation as a foundational value. She reiterated the timeline for revising the plans.

“We’re committed to engagement and we will revise those plans alongside the Water Forward 2024 Plan,” she said. “We look forward to working with all of our stakeholders to make those plans as robust as they can be.”

Save Our Springs Alliance Director Bill Bunch asked for the plans to return to the Integrated Water Resource Planning Community Task Force for further review and feedback as they refused to endorse the plan last month. He noted no one was given adequate time to review the new drafts of the plan. In fact, only Council members Alison Alter and Ryan Alter responded affirmatively when Bunch asked who had read the plans.

“Y’all are sleepwalking through a crisis,” Bunch said. “No dissent, no discussion, no questions on a plan that literally goes backwards on our conservation growth for the first time since, literally, the 1980s.” 

“We need to set conservation goals that keep our total use of the Highland Lakes, at a minimum, sustainable and flat like we’ve been doing for decades,” Bunch said. “The runoff into our water supply lakes has kept pace with evaporation and consumption, but that’s it. And this is our wet season – the long-range forecasts tell us we’re going into La Niña hotter and drier and we could be repeating the drought of record from the 1950s as soon as a few months from now.”

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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