Bee Cave system sold; Rollingwood holds election for purchase; West Lake Hills offer being considered
About a year and a half after the Lower Colorado River Authority board decided to sell its water and wastewater systems, the systems are being sold. Some are being sold in a group to an outside utility company, with others, such as the Rollingwood, West Lake Hills and the West Travis County Regional water and wastewater systems, going to the local municipalities they serve.
"If you go back to why we got in the water and wastewater utility business, it was in large part to try to help smaller systems become compliant with either Clean Water Act rules or different federal or state regulations," said Becky Motal, Lower Colorado River Authority general manager. "I think over the years we found that without a concentration of retail customers, LCRA is not really a good model for being in the utility business. The board decided that just the rate increases we would need for those systems to be paying their own way would be fairly significant."
In its earliest meetings, the LCRA board discussed selling all of its wastewater systems to Corix Infrastructure Inc., a Canadian utility company that operates many utility facilities in North America.
Many of the municipalities that use the systems formed a coalition, fearing that an outside entity purchasing the systems would take control away from local government and raise rates for users. The Coalition of Central Texas Utilities Development Corp. (UDC) includes the City of Bee Cave, City of West Lake Hills, City of Rollingwood, Travis County municipal districts No. 3 and No. 5, and several other affected municipalities.
