Concerns are mounting about protecting local streams, lakes and drinking water from neighborhood and industrial sewage as eastern Williamson County’s new wave of industries continue their meteoric growth.
Not too long ago, the country sought new developments and large-scale businesses, but now that they are here, the question about handling treated wastewater has moved from “what’s it all coming to” to “where is it all going to go?”
Cities, however, don’t move at the speed of development, and expansion of wastewater lines can be years away. So investors found a workaround – building privately owned wastewater treatment plants, also called package plants, on property outside of city limits.
“I think that the wastewater-package plants are being proposed everywhere because local municipalities drag out the development process for too many months,” said Hutto Mayor Mike Snyder. “Communication is poor and frequently municipalities make demands that are unreasonable. So, developers choose the easier and cheaper route by designing and building a package plant.”
While initial worries over residential and industrial development centered on the scarcity of water sources, cities soon discovered that wastewater disposal was just as large a concern. Hutto is looking at a budget of more than $500 million in wastewater infrastructure over the next five years, including adding new lines and lift stations, and substantially expanding its main treatment plant.
Taylor, with a population just under 20,000, had over $10 million in its capital-improvements plan for wastewater improvements and expansion at the beginning of the fiscal year.
TECQ
As of July 19, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s Texas Pollutant Discharge Elimination System program listed 24 applications to build new, private domestic wastewater treatment plants awaiting approval in Williamson County.
Three are in Hutto, five in Taylor and two in Thrall.
What’s all the stink about? It turns out that even with the best intentions, wastewater does not always go, or stay, where it’s meant to, experts said.
TCEQ records show Williamson County experienced 98 incidents of what the state agency calls sanitary-sewage overflows in 2022-23, spilling 315,271 gallons of wastewater. Causes ranged from power outages to equipment failure to human error.
Concerns both in government meetings and on social media have been aired over mega industries coming to eastern Williamson County, including the multibillion-dollar Samsung Austin Semiconductor fabrication plant in Taylor.
In 2022, the first Samsung Austin Semiconductor facility in Austin leaked as much as 763,000 gallons of acidic wastewater into a tributary of Harris Branch Creek.
In May, heavy rainfall in Waco caused an overflow at the city’s main wastewater treatment plant of over 3.3 million gallons. That followed on the heels of a February weather-related spill of more than 610,000 gallons of sewage flowing into Lake Waco, the city’s drinking-water source.
OVERSIGHT
Flooding, and the potential to spread health contaminants through the overflow, has been a major concern of communities. And it seems there is no real oversight of the issue.
“TCEQ does not have jurisdiction to address flooding in the wastewaterpermitting process. The permitting process is limited to controlling the discharge of pollutants into water in the state and protecting the water quality of the state’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters,” said TCEQ spokeswoman Victoria Cann. “Applicants are required to comply with all the numeric and narrative effluent limitations and other conditions in the proposed permit at all times, including during flooding conditions.”
State permits require the applicant to consider local environmental conditions to ensure water supply, aquatic life and recreational usage of the receiving waters are protected.
“All permit applications undergo a rigorous technical review to ensure surface-water uses are maintained. Draft permits for wastewater treatment and disposal are protective of human health and water quality standards,” Cann said.
Yet many in Central Texas are not convinced the practice is safe, and don’t like the idea of non-potable water being dumped into rivers, streams and lakes that are used for recreation, aquatic habitats and drinking water.
In March 2022, a group of advocates petitioned TCEQ to stop issuing new wastewater-discharge permits for some of the state’s still-pristine waterways, including areas along Barton, Cypress and Onion creeks and the Blanco and San Gabriel rivers. The petition was filed by 59 landowners and four environmental groups.
TCEQ denied the petition.
PROTEST
The state agency offers ways for the public to protest a package-plant application. The permitting process includes two public notices and a publiccomment period, which the agency says may result in the “reexamination and modification of a draft permit if new information is received during public review.”
The public has taken the agency at its word. Residents are submitting online comments and attending community meetings to make their voices heard.
Hutto Independent School District has sent resolutions against at least two of the proposed neighborhood sewage plants for “odor nuisance, noise nuisance and general concerns to the health and safety of students and staff ... as well as to residents in the immediate vicinity.”
Earlier this year, residents approached the Hutto City Council to ask for help in fighting a package plant planned next door to their neighborhood. Speakers were concerned about their quality of life being affected as the small stream running behind their homes would be carrying up to 1 million gallons a day of treated sewer water.
Neighbors brought up issues of the smell, health risks and also the potential for the stream to flood their yards with contaminated water during a heavy rain.
Sandol Johnson, a retired agriculture professor who lives in downtown Thrall, attended a TCEQ meeting in April to protest a package plant being built on U.S. 79 about a mile from her home.
“There were 60 or 70 people there and everyone was mad. They were all mad,” she said. “Especially since we have such nice creeks. Does (the developer) know often it floods here? He wants to build it here to hook into the creeks. But I think the volume of water would be ridiculous for these creeks.”
That developer, Wilco-Thrall 79 WWTP LLC, has applied for a facility that will discharge a daily average flow of 3 million gallons per day of treated wastewater. The discharge route will be from the plant site to a small unnamed stream leading to Long Branch stream, then to a reservoir, back to Long Branch and finally ending up in Brushy Creek.
According to TCEQ, discharges from the facility are expected to contain ammonia nitrogen and bacteria that can
“In general, responsible parties would need to conduct cleanup. In certain situations, the state may conduct cleanup operations and seek financial recovery.”
— VICTORIA CANN
TEXAS COMMISSION ON ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY
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