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To the Editor:
When will the State of Texas force the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to regulate the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) with the same heavy hand they use against everyday citizens and private businesses?
The LCRA spends millions of our dollars marketing themselves as the “stewards of our State’s waters.” Given the reality on the ground in Fayette County, that slogan is the biggest joke in Texas. The truth about their stewardship isn’t hidden in a conspiracy; it is sitting right in their own regulatory records.
For years, the Sam Seymour Fayette Power Project (FPP) has been leaching industrial toxins out of unlined coal ash impoundments, creating a toxic plume that has migrated through the Gulf Coast Aquifer all the way to the town of Ellinger.
State regulators cannot claim ignorance. They possess the exact comparative data proving this contamination is an industrial point-source crisis, not a natural occurrence: The Pristine Baseline: According to the 1979 EPA Final Environmental Impact Statement and the LCRA’s own hydrogeologist (Joe Adare), the water in this region was perfectly safe before the plant was built. Baseline tests from 19771978 showed arsenic below 4.0 μg/L, selenium below 10.0 μg/L, and cobalt below 6.0 μg/L.
The Dam Breach & The Cover-Up: Internal Fayette County Groundwater Conservation District files from 1984-1985 document active toe-drain seepage along the eastern embankment of the Coal Ash Disposal Pond. Instead of stepping in to enforce environmental law, the FCGCD and LCRA colluded to cover up this structural containment breach. Their brilliant engineering idea to fix it? Dig a hole to catch the toxic seepage and pump the leaking pollution right back into the same unlined ash pile it was escaping from. What a joke. Why not just build another dam? It makes just as much sense, and none of this bureaucratic theater will fix the disaster they have initiated.
The On-Site Spikes: TCEQ’s own Groundwater Selenium Work Plan (20052009) recorded selenium in compliance well AP-407 at more than four times the state Protective Concentration Level (PCL). By 2009, Earthjustice documented boundary well CBL-138 hitting 30.3 μg/L of cobalt and massive chloride levels exceeding secondary drinking water standards.
The Radial Plume Breakthrough: Under the Federal CCR Rule (2015-2025), testing at faci lity well MW-02 recorded cobalt at 1,170.0 μg/L—a staggering 195 times the Texas PCL. Downgradient well PS-3 hit manganese at 2,160.0 μg/L (over seven times the health advisory) and arsenic at 3.2 times the federal Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL).
The Municipal Crisis: The contamination did not stop at the property line. A 2017 EPA Region 6 Administrative Order confirmed the Ellinger municipal well (EP001) failed federal safety limits for arsenic. TCEQ’s own Drinking Water Watch logs from 2021-2025 show Ellinger’s water averaging 12.4 ppb of arsenic and peaking at 13.5 ppb.
Because of this negligence, the Texas Water Development Board had to issue a $1.128 million taxpayer- funded bailout for an emergency filtration plant in Ellinger. Yet even with millions in government aid, Ellinger is still putting unsafe, contaminated water into the everyday citizens it supplies.
Why does the TCEQ keep ignoring this? They have the data. They have the federal administrative orders. They have the 6-mile hydrogeological tracking of the heavy metal plume. Yet, they actively refuse to prioritize the safety, health, and property rights of Fayette County taxpayers over protecting the bureaucratic bully we know as the LCRA. Right now, the TCEQ is even approving an application from the LCRA (Docket No. 2026-0291-IWD) to eliminate numeric selenium limits entirely by using dilution tricks in Lake Fayette.
If a private citizen or an independent oil operator leaked heavy metals into a municipal drinking water supply at 195 times the legal limit, the state would seize their assets and lock them up. When the LCRA does it, the state looks the other way.
We are tired of the double standard. It is time for Austin to wake up, enforce the Texas Water Code, and hold the LCRA accountable for the multi-generational damage they are actively inflicting on our water table.
I urge every Fayette County resident to contact the leadership protecting this disaster and demand answers directly: LCRA CEO Rudy Garza: [email protected] TCEQ Executive Director Kelly Keel: execdir@tceq. texas.gov
Jerry Moerbe of Nelsonville
