by WES FERGUSON
The company that operates Kyle’s wastewater treatment plant will be fined $20,000 for violations stemming from a sewage spill last fall into a tributary of Plum Creek.
Meanwhile, an effort is under way to bring sewer service to the low-income Hillside Terrace neighborhood southeast of Buda. For sewage treatment, the 360 or so homes in Hillside Terrace currently use septic tanks, which can malfunction and lead to bacteria and other contaminants entering the Plum Creek tributary.
The Plum Creek Watershed Partnership is helping the city of Buda and Hays County pursue a state grant that would pay for the sewer-line installation to each of the homes and tie in to a city of Buda wastewater lift station across Hillside Terrace Drive from the subdivision.
This week, a contractor for the partnership is surveying residents to ensure the neighborhood qualifies for the funding from the Texas Water Development Board, a project that had been advocated by former Commissioner Jeff Barton and now is being pursued by his successor, Pct. 2 Commissioner Mark Jones. The Hays County Commissioners Court on Tuesday approved expending money from the LCRA utility fund to pay for the survey.
“Depending on household income levels for the area, we could potentially get 70 to 100 percent loan forgiveness for this project to construct the infrastructure,” said Nikki Dictson, a partnership coordinator and specialist with the Texas AgriLife Extension Service.
Plum Creek rises in Hays County north of Kyle and flows 52 miles through Lockhart, before converging with the San Marcos River south of Luling. To the west it’s a small and intermittent waterway, but it gathers strength as it flows downstream.
The state considers Plum Creek to be an impaired waterbody because it has too much harmful bacteria. In the Kyle area and throughout the watershed, bacteria enter the creek through municipal wastewater discharge, failing septic systems, pet waste left on lawns and in parks, and run-off from impervious cover.
The stream also has excess nutrients like phosphorous and nitrogen that can present a problem to aquatic life. Those nutrients can come from fertilizers used in agriculture and on urban lawns, livestock and wildlife, or could also result from wastewater discharge upstream.
Three years ago this month, the Plum Creek Watershed Partnership released a watershed protection plan to reduce the bacteria and nutrient pollutants. The plan’s measures range from encouraging homeowners to clean up their pet waste, to educating farmers on safer agricultural practices, to helping cities better treat wastewater before releasing it into waterways such as Plum Creek, to managing wildlife such as feral hogs and waterfowl.
Plum Creek’s was the first watershed protection plan in Texas to be accepted by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The wastewater spill, Oct. 31 through Nov. 1, dumped roughly one million gallons of untreated and undertreated wastewater into an unnamed tributary of Plum Creek when a pump in the intake area at the wastewater treatment plant failed to engage, causing a backup of sewage. When the problem was discovered, workers turned on booster pumps which sent the backed up wastewater into the plant and caused effluent to spill out the other end into the creek.
The spill is blamed for the death of nearly 3,000 fish and impacted five to six miles of creek downstream from the spill, south of Uhland. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality levied the fine on Feb. 14.
