On Dry Land: Fighting for Water in Travis County

Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/KUT News

The community just outside of Austin has been living without water for ten years.

Earlier this week we posted a video and audio report from Andy Uhler of KUT News (one of the public radio stations in the StateImpact Texas project) about a small community ten miles outside of Austin that lives without running water, the colonia of Las Lomitas. In the second and third part of the series, Uhler and fellow KUT-er Danny Guerra report on why they don’t have water, broken promises to them about supplying it, and how the community is now banding together to secure it.

Guerra writes:

“When families moved into the Las Lomitas subdivision back in 2002, they had no idea they’d live without running water for 10 years.

“I’ve seen houses get built two miles down the road, they have everything,” said Las Lomitas resident Victor Soto. “Here we are, we’ve been here a lot longer than that and we still can’t water. I don’t know, I didn’t think it would be such a big deal, but it is.”

Las Lomitas started out as 150 acres of unincorporated land just north of Creedmoor. The land developer, Hank Peavler, split the land into 10-acre parcels and put them up for sale. But the law didn’t require him to run water lines into the neighborhood.”

And Uhler says that there’s hope that water could be coming to Las Lomitas soon.

He writes:

“Las Lomitas residents have decided to take legal action to solve their water problem. Frances Leos Martinez is with the nonprofit legal aid group Community Building with Community Resources.

“Our hope and our goal is to identify sources of funding so that the families don’t have to bear the cost of it,” Martinez said. “Our goal is to bring down the cost as much as possible.”

They’ve zeroed in on a federally funded grant program called a community development block grant, or CDBG. They submitted the first round of paperwork in March. The next hurdle is a primary survey, conducted by Travis County.”

You can read all three parts of the series over at KUT.