They boat, swim and fish in this creek. Now Granbury plans to build sewage plant there
When Stacy Rist received a letter last October about Granbury’s plans to place a wastewater treatment plant near her RV business, the specifics went right over her head.
Bennett’s Camping Center and RV Ranch, which is a barbed-wire fence away from the planned sewage plant at 3121 Old Granbury Road, has been in Rist’s family since 1972. She couldn’t imagine that the city announcement would affect her family’s plans to expand the property to meet tourist demand.
Now, ahead of a Sept. 10 virtual public meeting about the city’s permit request led by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Rist compares the prospect of the plant moving in next door to watching her business be held hostage.
“It can be just one review that says, ‘You’re camping next to a sewer plant’ and it is going to destroy our RV park,” Rist said. “I feel like I’ve been taken at gunpoint and our family business has been taken at gunpoint, and we are along for the ride. If we don’t defeat this, our death is imminent.”
Rist is one of more than 300 Hood County residents who have voiced opposition to Granbury’s plans to discharge up to 2 million gallons of treated wastewater per day into a tributary of Rucker Creek, where many homeowners dock their boats, swim with grandchildren and fish for bass. The creek, which is about three feet deep, flows into Lake Granbury and then connects with the Brazos River.
The dispute has highlighted tensions between Granbury officials, who need more sewage treatment capacity to further develop the city of about 10,000 people, and county homeowners, who live outside of Granbury city limits but stand to be affected by the City Council’s actions.
“We want the city to be aware that, even though we’re not a part of their voting bloc, we have a voice,” said John Nolte, who lives along Rucker Creek.
Granbury officials have maintained that the treated water is safe and would not negatively impact the local economy or ecosystem. Based on data submitted by the city, the TCEQ issued a draft permit in May, stating that “no significant degradation of water quality is expected in Rucker Creek or Lake Granbury.” That conclusion could be modified if new information about the permit is received, according to the TCEQ’s public meeting announcement.
Under the name of Granbury Fresh, Rist, Nolte and other concerned residents hope to either convince city officials to withdraw their request and consider a new location or persuade the TCEQ to reject the permit. Their concerns range from drops in property values because of odor issues to the potential environmental consequences, including harmful algae blooms and accidental discharges of raw sewage, known as sanitary sewer overflows, which can lead to large fish kills and health issues.
“It seems like they picked the place that would have the most negative impact,” said John Ryan, who bought a house on Rucker Creek a year ago and helped build Granbury Fresh’s website. “I hope they find a more sane location for this that isn’t insane, that actually puts it deeper in the lake so that we’re not destroying this ecosystem here. I know that we need to treat sewage, but let’s do it smart and responsible.”
Granbury Mayor Nin Hulett and city manager Chris Coffman did not respond to interview requests. Hulett told the Hood County News in June that “there’s never a good place” for a sewage plant, indicating that most people prefer the facilities to be built in someone else’s neighborhood.
Alex Southern, a city spokesperson, said Granbury was limiting its comments due to “threats of litigation” from Granbury Fresh. Affected residents have the option of applying for a contested case hearing through the TCEQ, which is similar to a civil trial in state district court.
“The City of Granbury has met or exceeded all of the requirements prescribed by the TCEQ to date, and we look forward to the public meeting on September 10,” Southern wrote in an email.
Tensions high between county residents, city officials
Like the rest of North Texas, Granbury and Hood County have been adding people and businesses at a breakneck pace. Since 2010, the county’s population has grown by 20.5%, from 51,000 to 61,000 people, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. The bureau ranked Hood County as the ninth-fastest growing county in the U.S. between 2017 and 2018.
City leaders have done a great job of drawing visitors to Granbury, Rist said, and that means officials must act to meet the demands of developers. Victoria Calder, a clinical psychologist who serves as a leader of Granbury Fresh, said that Granbury needs the wastewater treatment plant in order to avoid stalling the development of new retail and residential properties that should be connected to the city system.
“We are the most impacted and we will not benefit from this plant in any way,” Calder said. “We are all on septic systems and we cannot vote for city council members, for the mayor, for anyone that’s making this choice. “
Calder and others living in the Mallard Pointe, Bentwater, Ashley Oaks and Highland Park subdivisions were upset that they were not officially notified by mail about Granbury’s plans, though they live on the creek’s path to Lake Granbury. She first heard about the plant during a Christmas party last year, and didn’t get access to the city’s official plans until April due to City Hall’s closure during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was really a shock to everyone to find out so late as the draft permit was just going forward,” Calder said. “We really scrambled and there’s still hundreds of people who don’t know.”
The city placed public notices seeking comments on the wastewater treatment plant in the Hood County News and a Spanish-language newspaper serving Central Texas, La Prensa Communidad, in June and November 2019, Calder said, as well as in May. Southern, the city spokesperson, told the Hood County News that Granbury also announced the plans during a city council meeting and “barely received any response in several months’ time frame that it was open for public comment and input.”
The lack of input was not for lack of interest, but because residents missed the announcements in the classified section of the newspaper, said Anita Branch, a retired engineer who has analyzed the city’s proposals with Granbury Fresh.
“As a result of this, that’s the first place I look in the newspaper,” Branch said. “I go to the back to see what the public notices have to say, to see what they’re planning to shove down our throats next. That’s really kind of sad, to live in a place that you really can’t trust the local authorities to do the right thing.”
Environmental concerns at center of virtual meeting
Once Calder obtained Granbury’s plans through a public information request, she launched into action. Because many homeowners in the Granbury area do not often check emails or may not own a computer, Calder and her neighbors started a GoFundMe to cover operational costs and went door-to-door, sometimes by golf cart, to ask more than 300 residents to sign a petition for a public hearing.
The meeting was eventually granted through a request from state Rep. Mike Lang, who represents Granbury. Older residents may still be intimidated by the webinar software used for the Sept. 10 meeting, Branch said, so Granbury Fresh is planning to set up computers at the Bentwater Activity Center so that all people have to do is “get up and speak their mind.”
Members of the group plan to bring up their concerns that Rucker Creek is too stagnant and shallow to dilute the treated wastewater or handle accidental raw sewage discharges, particularly during droughts when the creek bed runs dry. Other issue areas include the amount of E. coli that will be permitted to be discharged and the location of the plant near recreational areas.
“If raw sewage was dumped in this creek, it would just be standing there behind our boat docks with no way to wash it out,” said Dan Linebarger, who moved to Granbury this year and said he would have bought property elsewhere had he known about the plant. “It would just be a cesspool.”
Granbury Fresh members also plan to highlight the possibility of golden algae blooms due to increased salinity in the water, which caused the deaths of at least 5 million fish in Lake Granbury and the Brazos River basin in the early 2000s. Calder’s neighbor, George Griffin, has lived in Granbury for 21 years and said that fishing is a key reason why people want to live along Rucker Creek.
“I wish that they would reconsider what is actually going to happen to this creek, and I feel like it will be a dead zone for fishing,” Griffin said. “I believe that this can be done and be done without really turning people’s lives upside down.”
Calder said that she is cautiously optimistic about their prospects of convincing Granbury officials or the TCEQ to reconsider. Over the summer, she and other members of the group have met with Coffman and city council members about their concerns with the plant.
Granbury Fresh has also made connections with environmental groups, including the Texas Conservation Alliance and Friends of the Brazos River, who will offer free assistance to Granbury officials during the virtual meeting, Calder said.
“In a perfect, perfect world, it might never smell,” Calder said. “In a perfect, perfect world, we might not ever have a raw sewage spill or it may not have the contaminants. But it’s not a perfect world. Raw sewage spills happen and they will happen here … and it could be extremely dangerous for the public welfare and public health interest.”
