A reckless decision regarding a discharge permit for Guajolote Ranch would degrade the Helotes Creek watershed and contaminate the aquifer’s dwindling recharge.
By Lesli Hicks Lee,
For the Express-News
June 4, 2025
San Antonio stands on the brink of a water crisis.
Cross Mountain Ranch and surrounding northwest Bexar County wells are running dry; Medina Lake has plummeted to just 2.1% capacity; Choke Canyon Reservoir is holding a mere 13.8%; and Canyon Lake is down to 45.4%. For the first time in history, the Edwards Aquifer Authority declared Stage 5 drought restrictions before reverting to Stage 4 a few days later.
Amid this exceptional drought, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality this summer is taking up a proposed wastewater permit that would allow 365 million gallons of treated sewage to be discharged annually — a staggering 1 million gallons per day — into the Edwards Aquifer, our most vital water source.
A reckless decision in this case would degrade the Helotes Creek watershed and contaminate the aquifer’s already dwindling recharge. That watershed supplies 15% of the total recharge to the Edwards Aquifer, San Antonio’s largest source of drinking water. This issue hits close to home. I am a mother of two children adopted from China, a place notorious for contaminated water and bad air.
From the day they were born, they and their young peers were vulnerable to the lead and mercury coughed out of industrial cities, and the farm fertilizers in rural areas deposited in the country’s rivers. When we adopted these precious children, we did so conscious of how our abundant and pristine Texas water would help them thrive — and it has, so far.
Water is life because it maintains life. We told the adoption authorities we could offer them the best. How tragic it would be if it turns out we couldn’t.
I am not an environmentalist by habit or training. I am not an activist. But my job as a mother is to pay attention to what my children ingest. I could not sleep at night if I did nothing while my children and yours sipped tainted water on a hot summer day.
The wastewater permit in question is for a sewage plant that would serve Guajolote Ranch, an unsustainable 2,900-home development by Florida-based Lennar Corp. on about 1,100 acres in northwest Bexar County, and release its effluent into the Helotes Creek watershed.
That’s directly atop the Trinity Glen Rose Aquifer, the primary water source in the immediate area, and on the contributing zone leading to the recharge zone of the Edwards Aquifer, the principal source of drinking water for about 1.7 million people across 13 counties in South and Central Texas.
A study by Southwest Research Institute, funded through the city of San Antonio’s Edwards Aquifer Protection Plan, found that discharging any type of treated wastewater from a high-density residential development into the Helotes Creek watershed would “significantly degrade the watershed and the quality of water recharging the Edwards Aquifer.”
In other words, it would harm our children.
We are hopeful that the TCEQ’s new chair, a committed advocate for water protection and a mother herself, will chart a new course that recognizes science and reason — one that truly abides by the agency’s own stated mission “to protect our state’s public health and natural resources consistent with sustainable economic development.”
For the rest of us, it’s time to act. Call on the TCEQ and our elected leaders — all the way up to the top — to halt this disastrous permit before it’s too late. Our future depends on it. Our children and grandchildren depend upon it.
Lesli Hicks Lee lives on property served by a well in the Helotes Creek watershed that stands to be contaminated by Guajolote Ranch.
June 4, 2025
Lesli Hicks Lee
This commentary was published in the San Antonio Express-News on June 4, 2025. Photo credit: Miles Jones/The Paisano
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