EcoCommunity- take action now!

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) is proposing revisions to the state’s water quality standards for rivers, lakes, and streams. Some of the revisions would weaken efforts to keep or make Texas water bodies clean enough for swimming, boating, wading, canoeing, kayaking, and other recreational activities. 

Click here to act NOW to oppose these revisions!

The most troublesome revisions would:

• Redefine “contact recreation” into different categories of recreation and set weaker clean water standards for the new categories;
• Increase the levels of bacteria allowed in water bodies used for recreation, posing a greater risk of illness for people recreating in those streams and lakes;
• Increase the number of water samples required to classify a water body as “impaired” (polluted), thereby eliminating requirements for clean-up plans.

The result of these changes is that the water quality standards for bacterial pollution would be weakened for almost 300 water bodies in Texas! 

Contact the TCEQ today: https://secure2.convio.net/sierra/site/Advocacy?id=3744&pagename=homepage

Click here to send a message NOW to TCEQ telling them to maintain – not weaken – water quality standards for bacterial pollution in Texas rivers, lakes, and streams.

Why I Am Fired Up About Water Sustainability, and Why You Should Be Too!

In an age of online activism, we should jump at opportunities to be physically present with like-minded people and in the presence of locally elected decision-makers who need to hear from us.

Thursday, March 11th, is one such opportunity for Austinites and Central Texans to come together and rally for water stewardship and sustainability, not spending $1.2 billion on a new water treatment plant so a few people can over-water their lawns in the hot summer.

Come to our Rally for Water Sustainability on March 11th from 4-7pm at Austin City Hall. You can RSVP on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=487339750345&ref=mf

We can speak out FOR draft recommendations of the Water Conservation Task Force that call for reducing water use about 2% per year for the next ten years.

We can speak out FOR watering our lawns no more than once a week in the summer.

We can speak out FOR saving rate-payers $1.2 BILLION in projected costs (including interest payments on borrowed money) by putting the proposed water treatment plant on the shelf while the City updates the 30-year old Comprehensive Plan. (Shouldn’t our long-range plan have some impact on infrastructure decisions that will cost rate-payers over a billion dollars?)

We can speak out FOR saving the endangered Jollyville Plateau salamander, whose prime habitat (springs along Bull Creek) could be drained dry by the water treatment plant’s transmission mains and massive tunnels through thousands of feet of karst Edwards Aquifer and Glen Rose limestone.

If we don’t speak up, and soon, a one-vote majority will sink Austin into decades of debt to pay back money used to build a water treatment plant that we don’t need. Water rates will keep going up (they raised single family rates 10.1% last year).