LCRA backs off San Antonio water-sharing deal
The Lower Colorado River Authority appears to have pulled the plug on a potential multibillion-dollar project that would have shipped water from Austin’s river basin to San Antonio.
In a letter to a regional water planning group Wednesday, river authority project manager Leah Manning wrote that because of mounting water demands along the Colorado, “no water can be made available to (San Antonio) from the project as it was originally envisioned.”
The death of the estimated $2.2 billion water-sharing project could compel San Antonio to search for new sources of long-term water. And it could jeopardize far-reaching storage and conservation programs in the Colorado River basin that San Antonio was expected to finance.
“They’ve made a very serious signal they don’t want to move forward,” Robert Puente, the president of the San Antonio Water System, said Thursday.
