The Houston-Galveston Area Council is spearheading a campaign to improve water quality within the bodies of water that form the West Fork San Jacinto River and flow into Lake Houston.

In May, H-GAC created the West Fork Watersheds Partnership, a group that includes residents, business owners and local governments, such as Harris and Montgomery counties.

The WFWP’s goal is to create a 10-year voluntary watershed protection plan that will combat rising fecal bacteria levels in the West Fork San Jacinto River and Lake Creek, which feed into Lake Houston, H-GAC senior environmental planner Justin Bower said. Lake Houston is a drinking water reservoir.

The plan will also draw inspiration from recent conservation efforts along Cypress and Spring creeks.

High levels of fecal bacteria in watersheds are damaging to human health and recreational economies, Bower said.

“It’s kind of the polite way of saying there’s too much poop, and the bacteria from poop [is] getting into the water,” he said. “As bacteria levels go up, the chances of getting gastrointestinal illnesses and infections when you’re in or near the water [increases].”

In 2014, the West Fork San Jacinto River and Lake Creek were identified by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality as failing to meet state water quality standards, he said. The West Fork San Jacinto River was considered Category 5, meaning it surpassed the allotment of bacteria deemed healthy, according to documents. H-GAC received a three-year grant worth $455,000 from the Clean Water Act to begin funding the plan.

The WFWP held its first meeting in May and formalized its steering committee in July, Bower said. It will take at least two years to develop the protection plan and seven or eight years to implement the solutions selected, he said.

The partnership will begin to better understand the sources of increased fecal bacteria through computer modeling done by H-GAC in July before meeting residents who live near the watersheds, Bower said. Rapid urban development, agricultural areas and septic tanks are often causes of rising fecal bacteria levels. 

“It’s not like the old days of environmental regulation where your first concern was dealing with the factories and the pipes,” Bower said. “Now the focus is what we call nonpoint-source pollution—this sort of diffuse pollution that washes off the land. [It includes] all of the waste from our pets that is picked up and overflows from sewer systems.”

Protecting watersheds benefits the community by lowering the cost of treating water, providing more recreational areas and protecting the habitats of local wildlife, said Stephanie Prosser, conservation director for the Bayou Land Conservancy.

“Our cost of treating the water is getting higher all the time,” Prosser said. “There’s so much that needs to be filtered out of the water to get it suitable for consumption. That cost is going to continue to increase if we don’t do anything to protect our watersheds.”