An Open Letter to the New LCRA Manager: Pollution, Lawyers, and the TCEQ

To the editor and Mr. Garza: Welcome to the fray. As the newly appointed General Manager and CEO of the Lower Colorado River Authority, you have inherited an incredibly complex and contentious situation regarding the Fayette Power Project (FPP).

The fun is just starting for you. You come to this position with a good name and a welloutlined history of doing the right thing, specifically your hard-fought victories navigating the transition away from legacy coal assets at CPS Energy in San Antonio. Many of us here have a genuine hope that you will bring much-needed cultural change to this agency. But please, do not let the institutional sewer you have just been thrown into blemish your past hard work.

Because as you settle into your new office, there is a hard truth about Fayette County you need to understand: the pollution leaking from the FPP is an environmental crisis, but the machinery protecting that pollution is a far greater threat to our community.

This institutional contempt for rural Texans is baked into the very foundation of the FPP. It is a bitter piece of local history that when the original LCRA managers chose Fayette County as the site for this massive coal plant decades ago, their arrogant justification was that this county was populated by “old, stupid people” who wouldn’t have the money to fight back, and who would simply die of cancer before they ever saw the long-term effects of the pollution. They viewed our home not as a community, but as a politically weak sacrifice zone.

That exact same arrogance drives the agency today. For years, citizens here have watched the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) operate less like an environmental regulator and more like a lap dog for the LCRA.

When the LCRA gets caught polluting, the TCEQ does not penalize them. They simply move the goalposts. They either ignore the data or change the rules entirely to make the pollution legal—such as arbitrarily declaring that local county judges and landowners are not “affected persons” so they can ignore our protests while relaxing your pollution limits.

This is not a new oversight. For over 20 years, the LCRA has been fully aware of the total failure of their 23 groundwater monitoring wells at the FPP site. Instead of remediating the unlined ash ponds, the agency continually refuses to conduct undiluted testing at the actual points of discharge, preferring instead to mask the heavy metals using diluted math and regulatory loopholes. And now, the bill has come due: just this week, local authorities publicly confirmed a designated, physical effluent leak point near the Cedar Creek dam itself.

But the LCRA’s abuse of rural communities extends far beyond the ash ponds in Fayette County.

How long can our State leaders tell everyone that Texas is running out of water, when the biggest culprits are quasistate entities like the LCRA? The Authority operates as a money machine and an electric monopoly that is totally out of control.

When bureaucratic maneuvering isn’t enough, the LCRA unleashes its legal department. The Authority loves to jump into court, weaponizing its massive, ratepayer-funded financial power to overwhelm and demolish anyone who fatally falls in their path to the money.

Take the historic groundwater fight just up the road in the Lost Pines region. When local citizens and groundwater districts tried to stop the LCRA from siphoning 25,000 acrefeet— over 8.1 billion gallons, representing nearly $50 million inmunicipalwatervalue—from their aquifer, the LCRA didn’t back down. Backed by a $117 million ratepayer-funded infrastructure plan, they dragged local defenders through relentless, exhausting litigation, pushing rural families to the brink of bankruptcy just for trying to protect their own wells.

They operate less like a public utility and more like a group of state-funded gangsters, strong-arming everyone, every time.

The LCRA’s mission statement claims the agency operates as the “stewards of the rivers and waters of Texas.” But to the communities actually living next to your facilities, you operate like an entity that views local groundwater as yours to exploit, and local citizens as nuisances to be sued into submission.

Mr. Garza, you are new to this role. You did not build this combative, litigious machine, nor did you create the leaking ash ponds currently drawing federal complaints at the FPP dam. But you are the one at the controls now.

You have a choice. You can continue the legacy of deploying ratepayer-funded lawyers to crush local opposition while hiding behind the TCEQ, or you can leverage your San Antonio experience to actually become the environmental steward the LCRA claims to be.

The residents of Fayette County are testing their wells, the federal complaints are filed, and the public is watching. We are looking to you to change the culture.