Oct. 29, 2026 – Randy Neumann, chair of the steering committee of the Scenic Loop-Helotes Creek Alliance, spoke before the San Antonio City Council today in support of Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones’ approach of special-use authorizations on data centers, seeing parallels with the neighborhood group’s ongoing fight against Lennar Homes’ planned Guajolote Ranch development in northwest Bexar County.
He argued that simply meeting a checklist of regulatory requirements, or “by-right standards,” alone is not enough. Additional safeguards in the form of special-use authorizations should be preserved for projects “whose scale, location or resource demands warrant looking beyond the checklist.”
Lennar Homes wants to build 2,900 homes on 1,160 acres of Guajolote Ranch and build a wastewater plant that would release an average of 1 million gallons a day of treated sewage into the Helotes Creek watershed, which recharges up to 15% of the Edwards Aquifer. Though a wastewater permit has been approved, and city staff gave project approvals, it is being challenged under judicial review in district court.
“For nearly six years, our organization has been involved in the Guajolote Ranch wastewater permit controversy,” Neumann said. “And Guajolote has taught me something that goes directly to the issue before you today. Guajolote has shown us what can happen when we mistake regulatory compliance for stewardship.
“The applicant satisfied the regulatory requirements. The permit was approved. And yet serious concerns have been raised about the potential consequences of discharging treated wastewater in the Helotes Creek watershed and the quality of water recharging the Edwards Aquifer. The checklist said ‘yes.’ But the checklist was never designed to answer every question that mattered. We should not make that mistake with data centers.”
Neumann applauded Jones’ combined approach of by-right standards and specific-use authorization for data centers. “Because some things belong to all of us: the reliability of our water supply, the resilience of our electrical system, the health of our environment and the livability of the community we leave to those who come after us,” he concluded.
View Neumann’s presentation at this link: https://youtu.be/ZLuD2JS_e2E?si=UphvXWYZimS-33ld
Other background:
“Guajolote Ranch opponents sue the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to reverse permit decision” —
https://www.scenicloop.org/post/1938/guajolote-ranch-opponents-sue-the-texas-commission-on-environmental-quality-to-reverse-permit-decision/
City Council rejects a MUD for Guajolote Ranch, and Lennar’s middle-finger response (video):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0a9X2sabCM
“Scenic Loop-Helotes Creek Alliance files incident reports to federal, state and local agencies over suspected stormwater runoff from Guajolote Ranch”:
https://www.scenicloop.org/post/2061/scenic-loop-helotes-creek-alliance-files-incident-reports-to-federal-state-and-local-agencies-over-suspected-stormwater-runoff-from-guajolote-ranch/
Other releases at https://www.scenicloop.org/
CONTACTS:
Steve Lee, Scenic Loop-Helotes Creek Alliance, 210-415-2402 (text), media@scenicloop.orgRandy Neumann, 210-867-2826 (cell/text), uhit@aol.com
The Scenic Loop-Helotes Creek Alliance is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) group representing the largest neighborhood by square mile recognized by the San Antonio Neighborhood & Housing Services Department, a wide corridor along Scenic Loop Road from Bandera Road to north of Babcock Road.
Guajollote Ranch is an unwanted cancer on Scenic Loop and Grey Forest. It will be a crowded area of postage stamp sized lots that will dump millions of gallons of effluent into Helotes Creek and straight into our ONE source of drinking water. No one but Lennar wants this project to go forward. We beat them in City Council but they continue to cut trees and blast hills.