Dear Neighbor:

Soon, property owners adjacent to the District’s eastern water recycling facilities will receive a second notification from the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (TNRCC) that we filed an application to amend our wastewater disposal permit, and that a draft permit has been issued. The TNRCC notification briefly describes some of the changes we would like to make in our existing permit and provides information on the public comment process. This letter describes in a little more detail what changes we plan to make and offers to provide you with additional information, if needed.

The Lakeway Municipal Utility District has been in the drinking water supply and wastewater recycling business for a long time. By law, no matter how purified it is, wastewater may not be recycled to the lake. Since 1972, our golf courses have used our recycled water for landscape irrigation. In the mid-1990s we began to produce more water than could be usefully applied to the golf courses, so we developed a 45-acre cedar irrigation tract on Lohmans Crossing to take the additional water. At the same time, we also embarked on a program to make this water available to all of the large-volume commercial customers and residential homeowner associations where it is economically feasible. Currently we have fifteen major recycled water users that used over 25,000,000 gallons of recycled water last year.

Many people do not think about what happens to the water they use after it goes down the drain. The District collects the water in a series of pipes and pump stations that lead to two separate water recycling plants. The one that is the subject of the TNRCC notification is our S-4 Water Recycling Plant located on Palos Verdes Drive in the east part of the District. Wastewater enters the plant through a pump station on the site, and it is treated by a biological process known as "activated sludge", where naturally occurring microbes break down and remove the organic matter and pollutants in the water. The microbes are easily removed from the water as sludge in a settling tank, and the clear water from the settling tank is chlorinated to destroy any remaining microorganisms before it is pumped to our holding pond on Clubhouse Drive. The water is held in the pond until it is needed for the Yaupon Golf Course or our recycled water customers. Occasionally, when the golf course or our customers are not using enough of the water we produce, we then irrigate the cedar tract.

The TNRCC requires us to have sufficient land owned or under contract for disposal of all recycled water, regardless of recycled water customer use. Accordingly, we have contracts and agreements with the golf course and City of Lakeway allowing us to use the golf course and median of Lakeway Boulevard. Since this is not enough land to properly recycle the water, we also built the Lohmans cedar irrigation tract in 1995.

Since the demands on our system have continued to grow as our community matures, we obtained a permit amendment in 1999 from the TNRCC to develop an additional storage pond and new cedar irrigation area. This pond and cedar irrigation area are currently under construction on an 81-acre tract at Hwy 620 and Stewart Road. In addition, we are currently constructing improvements at the water recycling plant to increase our capacity, improve reliability, and enhance the quality of water. Among other improvements, we will add filtration to the treatment process to ensure the continued high quality of water that we produce as the load on the plant increases.

The changes we are seeking to our permit in this amendment are to:

• Increase the system flow rate from 0.650 million gallons per day (mgd) to an annual average of 0.810 mgd. This will be done through the improvements at the treatment plant without any significant increase in the irrigation area. There will be no additional irrigation sites required by TNRCC under the permit. However, our customers may continue to install landscape irrigation systems using recycled water. We are requesting this change to take advantage of the full capacity that can be provided by our treatment plant without incurring significant additional cost.

• Increase the total cedar irrigation area from 96.5 to 98 acres. We need this minor change because, after we finalized our design, it was efficient to include this 1.5-acre area in the new cedar irrigation area at 620 and Stewart Road.

• Irrigate the cedar irrigation areas all year round instead of only in the six winter months. This will allow us to reduce the amount of water we use on the cedar tracts in the winter and make the most efficient use of the extra storage volume we are currently building. Our recycled water customers can beneficially reuse more of our water and less will be "wasted" on the cedars. This will conserve our precious Lake Travis water, instead of using it for landscape irrigation.

• Eliminate a requirement in our current permit to monitor the groundwater. The groundwater monitoring was required in the 1994 permit because the original cedar irrigation tract appeared to be a novel project to the TNRCC. The results of an intensive controlled study of monitoring since 1996, show that groundwater contamination is not a problem. Our study showed that all of the water we apply to the cedars is either used for growth or evaporates. This type of monitoring was appropriate for an untried system, such as the original cedar irrigation system, but is not required for any other irrigation site. Now that the cedar irrigation system has been demonstrated to be effective and safe, there is no need to continue the expensive monitoring.

We believe that the changes we seek will optimize the capital investments we are in the process of making while enhancing water conservation and public health. If you have any questions regarding our plans or want to get more information regarding the District, please feel free to give me a call at 261-6222 ext 14.

Richard Eason
General Manager