Well, it's still HOT. Rain possible in the forecast for Tuesday - let's hope and pray it comes to fruition. Don't forget, water restrictions are in place for lawns. Check with your local MUD or Water District for your schedule.
Lake Travis is down and dropping every day. Let's talk abut that. Currently we are at about 657.58 - that's about 10 feet below normal for this time of year. There is currently about 751,000 acre feet of water in Travis, it's about 66% of full. If you'll notice the picture at the top of the blog, it's when they had 4 gates open and the generators going because of the significant rains. Long time ago!
There's a problem. The inflow to Travis is about 13 acre feet (July 27, 2018) and the release is about 2,122 acre feet. That's a deficit of about 2109 acre feet a day. Where's all that water going?
It goes downstream. A certain portion is dedicated to feed the downstream flow and the estuaries near the gulf coast. The rest is committed to contracts from years past for agriculture. This is called "interruptible" and in years past the rice farmers paid about $6 an acre foot. Now their price is about $39 - $55 an acre foot. Unfortunately, the "firm" customers (us) pay $145*.
Because of the LOW inflows to the highland lakes, LCRA has reduced the sale of interrubtible water to downstream farmers. It looks like instead of approx. 85,000 acre feet they will get 55,000 acre feet. The LCRA does use this release to generate power at Mansfield Dam. I did check with LCRA and they confirmed they are contracting to send second season water downstream.
In my opinion, this is better than it was 5 year ago, but not nearly good enough. There should be NO agriculture release when inflows to Travis and Buchanan are almost non existent.
===============
Council held their first budget session Monday evening - here is a link to the video. The "effective" tax rate is $0.1644446 per $100 valuation. That is the rate with no tax increase - our current rate is $0.174 per $100 valuation. Because of the increase of appraised value of property, the rate to get the same amount of dollars goes to the "effective" rate.
The "rollback" rate is $0.17590357 per $100 valuation. Any tax increase to that rate or above will trigger and election. This is a complex calculation that takes into account sales tax used to reduce the tax rate and plus some other variables. It appears the insurance rate the city pays for employees went up over 15%. Other items were discussed, but they will get into the meat of the budget at the next meeting.
For years previous councils reduced the tax rate to keep the city income fairly level. At one time the tax rate was about $0.23 per $100 valuation. We'll see how the negotiations go at the next few meetings.
===============I've been taking pictures of most of the new commercial construction sites around the City. This is one of the new apartments being built on 620 towards Hudson Bend. Larger than I first expected, I'll bet there will be another light there soon....
This is the pad where Jason's Deli will be located in the Oak's. It will be interesting construction with the drainage ditch running down the middle of the pad. I'm told it is progressing through the permitting process and looks like it will make it. It turns out there are a few issues with "green space" and impervious cover in the Oaks, so Building and Development are looking at that. Looks like Stratus will have to transfer some property to them.If you want to see other sites, here's a link to my web page with many other sites including hotels and schools. Feel free to explore the other pages.
================
The Lakeway Players are auditioning for "The Drowsy Chaperone" in August. Here is a link to all the particulars - sounds like a good show!
 |
| Photo courtesy Ed LeBlanc |
That's all for today, hope you are all staying cool. I'm showing over 100 degrees again today.
If you would like to be added (or removed) to my email list send a note to lakeway@bain.us.
Joe Bain
lakeway@bain.us
www.skypict.com
No comments:
Post a Comment