Consultant Jason Jones outlines three-pronged plan to strengthen Lampasas water supply

Jason Jones, the consultant who led a multi-month study of Lampasas-area water supplies, told the council on March 23 that the city faces structural vulnerabilities exposed in 2023 and should pursue a three-part approach to avoid future service interruptions. “I can assure you I’m not the only one that takes these things seriously,” Jones said as he summarized field measurements, historical context and options for building resilience.

Jones described how Lampasas historically relied on springs and Sulfur Creek, then shifted to supplies from Stillhouse Hollow Lake and a 1980s-era regional transmission network. He said the city’s surface-water rights include an unusually early priority date (1914) that matters during droughts and that lake and intake vulnerabilities in 2023 combined with maintenance and water-quality events to cause rationing and plant outages.

The study’s central recommendation is a diversified, “three-legged stool” strategy: maintain and prioritize capital upgrades to the existing Stillhouse Hollow treatment and transmission system; develop local supplemental supplies (a Sulfur Creek intake paired with nearby storage and targeted groundwater wells); and create a financing plan that could include shared regional investment. Jones proposed a regional governance option — a Stillhouse Hollow West Regional Water Authority — that would hold and manage transmission and plant assets with cost-based rates and representation for wholesale customers.

On local supplies, Jones pointed to a downstream intake site near Chestnut/Waters Street and a nearby off-channel storage possibility tied to a county flood-control reservoir. He said a modest on-site storage volume (on the order of several hundred acre-feet) could let the city bridge drought periods and make treatment operations easier. Jones also identified a shallow-to-deeper local aquifer (referred to in the presentation as the Elm/Elmer Saba aquifer) as a promising groundwater source: “You’re not going to have to treat that water,” he said, but cautioned that pumping would be subject to groundwater-district permitting and limits.

Jones provided order-of-magnitude costs to illustrate trade-offs: a package of groundwater wells and connections might be in the roughly $5 million range for a ~1 million-gallon-per-day capacity; a first-phase 1 MGD Sulfur Creek treatment facility (designed to blend and reuse brine for irrigation) was estimated at about $20 million; and system-wide rehabilitation and shared regional improvements were discussed on the order of tens of millions (a $75 million figure was cited as a regional improvement magnitude). He emphasized that small, stand-alone projects tend to have higher per-gallon costs and recommended pursuing grants and low-interest loans where possible.

Councilors pressed Jones on implementation steps, permitting and rate impacts. Jones said the next steps should include a joint capital-improvement plan with Central Texas Water Supply Corporation, a utility-rate study to model customer impacts, targeted permitting work for groundwater wells, and a closer engineering assessment to refine cost and sequencing. He noted that a regional approach could increase funding options, including state participation loans tied to projects included in the regional water plan.

The city will consider follow-up workshops and directed staff to evaluate the study’s recommendations and seek more detailed cost estimates and financing scenarios. The presentation ran from the start of the workshop into an extended Q&A; staff flagged the report’s final version (delivered in January) as the basis for these recommendations.

The council did not adopt a formal policy in the session; Jones’ presentation was offered as a planning and priority-setting document and staff was asked to return with more specific financing and project sequencing information.