The San Antonio City Council will get a briefing this morning about a
controversial study of the city’s future water supply as the council
prepares to vote next week on raising water and sewer rates.
Roel Lopez, director of the Texas A&M Institute for Renewable Natural Resources, took over the study, which ranked 12 water supply projects and graded the San Antonio Water System on 24 water policy issues.
in September and its preliminary findings, particularly about a
142-mile water pipeline, came under heavy criticism from city officials
and SAWS.
That draft rated the Vista Ridge pipeline — a $844 million construction project that the City Council unanimously approved in October 2014 — as high risk.
Lopez agreed that the draft could be seen as skewed and subjective and took over the study in October.
The city originally contracted with Calvin Finch, a former director
of water conservation for SAWS who retired from the Texas A&M Water
Resources Institute, an IRNR affiliate, in May. Lopez issued his final version Nov. 5.
The study reviewed, among other projects, the controversial pipeline,
which would deliver 16.3 billion gallons per year from the
Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer below Burleson County. The draft version calls
the project high risk, while the final report lowered it to medium risk.
The City Council is set to vote Nov. 19 on water rate increases that would in part fund the project, which will be built by a global infrastructure corporation based in Spain.
The city commissioned the report at the request of District 8 Councilman Ron Nirenberg, who asked for it in February 2014.
The final report included extensive reviews by five anonymous water
experts Lopez chose to critique Finch’s work. Without the leak of Finch’s July draft to the Express-News, the public might never have seen the earlier version, Lopez said.
Typically, researchers use comments made by their peers to improve on
their drafts before submitting a final version, but the council’s
upcoming vote on water rates led Lopez, a wildlife biologist, to submit
the draft and final versions together.
“For full transparency, we just wanted to get everything out there,”
Lopez said. “We didn’t want to run into the situation of, ‘Oh, you
started changing things.’”
In Lopez’s view, Finch’s method of grading various water projects on
multiple categories — using “-” for low risk, “0” for neutral risk and
“+” for high risk — then adding up each category for a final score, was
“a very unusual scale to use.”
Zeroes contributed less to the final score than pluses or minuses, he
said. Finch assigned two pluses — “++”— for distance to water supply
but not other categories, giving these it more weight than others, Lopez
said.
Another problem was the way each final score was labeled. Projects
that scored “-1” were deemed low risk, and projects scoring “+1” were
deemed “medium risk,” though both are the same distance from zero, he
said.
“That’s just a real problem with methodology,” Lopez said.
The five experts scattered across Texas picked up on these issues and
created their own scale, ranking projects from 0 to 1 uniformly on
eight criteria. They added the scores, then divided by eight to achieve a
single risk score.
“The panel made it mathematically correct,” Lopez said.
The five also questioned the relevance of some categories, such as
need for water treatment or distance to water supply, among other
issues, he said.
Though much of the study’s data and discussions were unchanged
between versions, the new rating system led to drastically different
conclusions. For example, Finch’s draft ranked the city’s continued
reliance on the Edwards Aquifer as “low.” In the final report, that
aquifer earned a higher numerical risk score than Vista Ridge, though
both fell within the medium-risk category.
After reading the final report, Finch said he wished he could have
had a chance to discuss the five-member panel’s issues in person and
address their critiques before the final version was published, as is
more common in scientific research.
“Usually, a peer-review process is done for the benefit of the
authors,” Finch said. “If you’re going to publish something, all of the
folks that commented should be listed.”
He also disagreed with some of the panel’s conclusions, especially
rating Vista Ridge and continued reliance on the Edwards Aquifer, which
lies below Bexar County, as both medium risk. Distance to a water supply
does make a difference, he said.
“You could have a heck of a panel discussion comparing Edwards Aquifer to Vista Ridge in terms of risk,” Finch said.
Though controversy over the report has often focused on him, Finch was not alone in his authorship of the original version.
While Vista Ridge has dominated the political flap over the report,
it was supposed to be a comprehensive look at a variety of issues and
projects based on available data, he said.
In the end, the draft’s early release made the process worse for him, the city and SAWS, Finch said.
“I do think it would have been better without the leak,” he said.
bgibbons@express-news.net
Twitter: @bgibbs
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