Spotlight On Water Concerns

Increasing development in rural areas of Fayette County has a lot of folks concerned about the future of groundwater resources in the County. County Judge Joe Weber invited Fayette County Groundwater Conservation District Manager David Van Dresar to the Commissioners Court meeting on Nov. 23 to discuss the issue.

Van Dresar spoke at length about the groundwater conditions in Fayette County at that meeting. While concerns may be high, Van Dresar told the Record after the meeting that he believes the current state and county regulations are adequate to protect groundwater resources.

“The groundwater district’s rules, as created and amended, are in place to protect the groundwater in Fayette County,” Van Dresar said. “The state, I don’t think, needs to do anything. They need to allow the groundwater district to continue to perform their jobs as it stands right now. I don’t think we need any more regulations from the state.”

At the Nov. 23 meeting, Van Dresar said Fayette County lies on top of six major groundwater aquifers. Most of the water wells in the County are drilled into two of those, he said – the Yegua-Jackson Aquifer and the Gulf Coast Aquifer.

“The (property) subdivisions that everyone is concerned with at present would be (getting water from) those two aquifers,” Van Dresar said at the meeting. “Why? They’re the ones closest to the surface. The other ones are rather deep.”

Van Dresar said the vast majority of water wells in Fayette County are drilled for domestic purposes.

“Most of our wells are house wells,” he said. “They’re low production house wells.”

The biggest user of water in Fayette County is the oil and gas industry. He said the oil and gas industry uses high volumes of water when oil wells are drilled. But once those oil wells are drilled, the water usage stops. Van Dresar said water wells drilled for industrial purposes are strictly regulated. Domestic water wells, on the other hand, require only a registration with the district.

“We manage the supply by regulating those that would produce too much and possibly affect their neighbors,” he said. “How do we protect (wells)? By space. We give them distance,” he said.

The regulations include a 50-foot minimum setback from property lines. Wells must also be spaced away from each other at a minimum of one foot per gallon of production.

“When we talk about subdivisions coming in, tract size matters,” Van Dresar said. “We don’t have tract size regulations in the groundwater rules anymore.”

He said the Texas Legislature decided about 10 years ago to remove tract size regulations from groundwater districts. Fayette County previously had a five-acre minimum rule for drilling water wells.

“That had to go away,” Van Dresar said. “The State Legislature and Supreme Court said all landowners own the water underneath their land.”

The County has a two-acre minimum rule for septic systems. But there are no minimum acreage rules for drilling water wells.

However, Van Dresar said the increasing number of domestic water wells places little strain on the aquifers as long as the wells are adequate spaced apart.

“Can these subdivisions affect the overall scheme of the aquifers? Not really. They’re a drop in the bucket,” he said.

“If you have two wells too close together … they can start affecting one another,” he added. “That could be the biggest problem with subdivisions with too many wells in them. It’s distance, it’s depth, it’s which aquifer they are in – that controls how wells affect each other in the grand scheme of things.”

Van Dresar said Fayette County will not run out of groundwater any time soon.

“We have the water to supply the needs of Fayette County and its residents based on the science, mathematics and modeling,” Van Dresar said.

Van Dresar said there is an abundance of groundwater in the deeper aquifers, but he said it may cost more to drill wells to reach it. Furthermore, he said deep groundwater is typically brackish and contains higher levels of minerals. Accordingly, it could cost more to treat.

Weber asked Van Dresar about water quality concerns. Van Dresar said the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality regulates water quality issues. However, he said the groundwater district offers water quality testing for residents.

Furthermore, he said in 2017 the groundwater district mimicked a 1965 water quality study that was done in Fayette County. He said that study indicated that groundwater quality in Fayette County has not changed over those years.

“Not anything changed,” he said.

Weber asked Van Dresar if there was anything the County could do to manage water quality or quantity.

“You don’t have that authority,” Van Dresar said. “We can’t limit people from wanting to move to the country. This is a fantastic place to live, and people are finding that out. Unfortunately, we are getting developers coming in who I don’t think have thought out everything.”

Van Dresar said that in municipalities, developers who build a subdivision must pay for and install all the infrastructure and then hand it over to the city for maintenance.

“Out here, do they put the utilities in and then deed it over to the water supply people?” he said. “That may be a way, where there’s just one hole in the ground that can be regulated by the state as a public water supply. It depends on how the subdivision regulations are written.”

Pct. 4 Commissioner Drew Brossmann said he doubted that rural developers could turn a profit if they had to install a state-regulated public water supply.

Brossmann asked Van Dresar if the groundwater district would allow businesses to drill wells here and pump water to other parts of the state.

“It is not against the law for anyone to drill a well for the purpose of exploitation,” Van Dresar said. “It’s not against state law or any of the district’s regulations. How does that work? All permits are based on how much land you control. So a person can’t buy an acre of land and pull 50,000 acre-feet out of it and sell to someone else. Here, if they need 50,000 acre-feet of water, they would need 25,000 acres of land under their complete control. It’s two acre-feet per acre. The acreage it would take to supply something like that would be very, very difficult in this county.”

Weber thanked Van Dresar for appearing at the meeting.

“With the demand we have now, and the cost of drilling water, I’ve come to the conclusion that one thing nobody should never do is sell their water,” Weber said. “You want to hang on to your water. These metropolitan areas are going to be searching for water. My advice is to hang on to it. As we plan for growth, it’s going to be much more expensive to maintain water supply and quality of water.”