Efforts by state environmental agencies to improve the water quality within the Medina River could have significant trickle-down benefits for the San Antonio River.
The Texas Water Resources Institute, a research arm of the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, has partnered with the San Antonio River Authority to create a watershed improvement plan that will help improve the water quality of the Lower Medina River watershed. Currently, the water quality in the Medina River below Diversion Lake — just west of San Antonio — is designated by the state as impaired because of elevated bacteria levels, said Jason Gerlich, a research specialist at the institute.
“There are also nutrient concerns present in the watershed,” Gerlich said. “Both the bacteria impairment and nutrient concern can begin to be addressed through the watershed plan.”
While plenty of San Antonio residents take to floating the Medina River during the spring and summer months, the watershed improvement plan will have direct health benefits for the San Antonio River as well, said Lucas Gregory, an associate director of research. Just south of San Antonio, the Medina River meets and flows into the San Antonio River, which then continues southeast and drains into the San Antonio Bay and Gulf of Mexico.
“You’ve got to remember that water is a singular resource,” Gregory said. “If you live in Dallas and then you travel to Houston and drink a glass of water from Houston, you’re drinking water that came out of the wastewater treatment plant in Dallas, flowed down the Trinity River and then into [a Houston] intake system.”
As water becomes a more coveted resource in a booming Texas, making sure the water available is of good quality will continue to grow more important, he said.
The creation of this plan is being funded through a federal Clean Water Act grant administered by the Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Collecting input
Currently, the Texas Water Resources Institute and San Antonio River Authority are holding a series of stakeholder and public input meetings to both explain the project and its goals to nearby residents and to gauge their feedback on what they would like to see implemented, Gregory said.
The first of these meetings took place in Castroville in October. The second meeting was also in Castroville earlier this month. A date, time and place for the next meeting has yet to be set, said Laura Muntean, a media relations coordinator for Texas A&M AgriLife.
Citizen “input is essential for identifying land and water issues and ensuring that appropriate and desirable management measures are included in the watershed-based plan,” Gerlich said.
Staff holds typically four or five public input meetings before actually setting about to create the plan, Gregory said, although it can have as many as 10 to 12 if the public seems particularly interested. They can take on different formats, he noted, from lecture-style discussions to working group discussions. Educating the public on watersheds, how they work as a part of the ecosystem, and how humans impact them is also a big reason for these public meetings, he added.
“It just kind of depends on the group and how complicated the issues are in the watershed and how good their base knowledge is on those issues,” Gregory said.
After sufficient public input has been collected, the research team gets to work discussing which strategies to implement for the watershed and putting together a draft of the plan, Gregory said.
Staff uses data points about the watershed to also guide the process, he added. In this case, most of the scientific data about the Medina River has been collected by the San Antonio River Authority, Gregory said.
Common strategies that may be in a plan include educating local farmers on best practices and on which products to use or which to avoid, helping restore native grasses to riverbeds and adding more waste bins and pet waste bag stations along popular sections of a river, according to the EPA.
After the watershed improvement plan is drafted, it will go to both the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board and then to the EPA, Gregory said.
“They basically just review it and say ‘Yes, this looks good to us, it meets what we say a watershed plan needs to,’ or give us other suggestions for the plan,” he said.
Data collected by the San Antonio River Authority has shown the water quality in the Medina River watershed is very poor, and the river has high levels of E. coli — a type of bacteria typically used as the testing standard, as its presence in water is a strong indicator of sewage or animal waste contamination.
The watershed improvement plan will hopefully bring those levels down, helping make the water flowing into the San Antonio River cleaner, Gregory said.
“It behooves us, and it behooves the citizens of San Antonio and in the watershed area at large, to make sure that all of our water bodies are protected as much as possible,” said Shaun Donovan, the river authority’s manager of environmental sciences.
The health of watersheds in Central Texas can directly affect the health of watersheds to the south, all the way down to the coast, Gregory said.
“That impacts that coastal water quality as well, so that’s really kind of the message that I try to convey to people — it’s really just about being good stewards of whatever resources you have,” Gregory said.