At an open meeting on Wednesday, November 4, the Commissioners of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) voted 3-0 to grant the LCRA’s application to revise its Water Management Plan.

 

The Plan approved by the TCEQ today will replace the Plan that it approved in January 2010, and will go into effect by January 1, 2016. Central Texas Water Coalition President Jo Karr Tedder reacted to the decision as follows:

“This is good news for Central Texas. We applaud the TCEQ and LCRA for taking steps to protect the drinking water supply for over a million people. We are grateful for the considerable amount of work by both agencies, as well as many stakeholders, that went into designing this revised plan. We are hopeful that it will work as intended to prevent the Highland Lakes from being drained to dangerously low levels as they were under the prior Plan.

“The revised Plan will protect the needs of drinking water customers in Central Texas by raising the trigger levels for releases of water downstream so that more water remains in storage.

Another big improvement is that this plan takes into account different levels of drought conditions and projections of future water storage to determine the amount of water that will be released.”

“Even with this new Plan in place and with lakes back to functional levels after recent downpours, we must never take our water supply for granted. All water users must do their best to conserve water every day. Water should be managed and valued as the precious resource that it is.

 

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