By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
A water well that could provide another source of drinking water for Del Rio will cost about $14 million to bring online, city council members learned Tuesday.
The city council heard an update on the water well project and the city’s watershed master plan (see separate story) from International Consulting Engineers (ICE).
Interim Public Works Director Greg Velazquez introduced the presentation, telling the council, “ICE will do an update on the secondary municipal well and our watershed master plan.”
He then turned the presentation over to ICE engineer Daniel Diaz.
Diaz told the council, “We are here to brief you on the engineering task you requested from us with regards to the municipal well and the updated watershed analysis.”
Diaz said ICE has provided the city with some 3,000 pages of data on the two projects, and its engineers are available to answer any questions the council and city administrators have on that data.
“What we’re going to present to you today is an opportunity for the city to strive towards a secondary source of water for the entire community. Due to its critical importance, Mr. Velazquez and Mr. Menchaca (the city’s purchasing agent), focused on ensuring that a potential solution could be identified, and based on the engineering analysis we’ve done up to this point and based on the documentation we’ve provided to you, I believe that we have a potential solution to move forward,” Diaz said.
Diaz said the scope of work for the proposed municipal well was carried out in two phases.
“We conducted electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) and geophysical surveying with our sub-consultants to identify a favorable location based on what the city provided to us for a municipal well near the water treatment plant, and we completed that in five weeks during May and June,” Diaz said.
Once a favorable site was identified, located on an archery range on city property just north of the San Felipe Springs Golf Course, engineers “conducted test well drilling, pump testing, electric and video logging, monitoring well piezometer draw-down observations and geoscientist data interpretation on the data that we had,” Diaz said.
Diaz then called on engineer Mark Roetzel of MRoetzel Consulting LLC to make the presentation about the proposed municipal well.
Roetzel said the first part of the analysis included a survey of the prospective well site with aerial LIDAR (light detection and ranging) mapping to identify “potential surface features that would indicate the likelihood of subsurface water, followed by an electrical conductivity test below the surface to look for areas that appear to be potentially saturated.”
After a prospective site was identified, a 180-foot test well and two monitoring wells were drilled, and a 24-hour pump test at 300 gallons per minute was conducted, Roetzel said.
“Based on the results of the pumping test, it appears that the well, once it is over-drilled to a full-size well, may produce up to approximately 2,000 gallons per minute, which is about 3 million gallons per day, or 3,226 acre-feet a year, which would be a significant production augmenting the San Felipe Springs,” Roetzel said.
He added, “The water quality results from the well show (the water) is ‘highly potable,’ with similar chemistry to the San Felipe East/West Springs, which means it can be blended into the distribution system without concerns for altering chemistry between these sources.”
Roetzel also spoke to the council about “next steps” for the new municipal water well.
He said the current estimate for the “full production well installation and the transfer of that water to the water treatment plant” is about $12 million.
Roetzel said ICE has submitted an application to the U.S. Department of the Interior/Bureau of Reclamation for a WaterSMART grant. He said the grant is a 50/50 match, and the city will be notified if it has received the grant in March 2025.
Roetzel told the council there is some ongoing coordination needed with the Texas Historical Commission required “due to archeological discoveries in the vicinity” from a 1999 study and a design connection for the transfer line from the well site to the water treatment plant.
Following Roetzel’s presentation, Mayor Al Arreola asked if there were any questions from the council.
Councilman J.P. Sanchez said, “You pretty much answered it. You said the water (from the well) tested pretty much the same as the water we’re using now?”
“Chemically, it’s very compatible, so that’s always something we check because you don’t want to mix waters that are too different into a distribution system, but that’s as we expected it would be. It’s coming from the same aquifer, so it’s pretty much the same chemical constituency of the water,” Roetzel replied.
“And (the WaterSMART) grant we’re looking at is a 50/50 match, so with the city would have to come up with approximately $6 million to the grant’s $6 million, correct?” Sanchez asked.
Diaz answered the question: “As part of the submission package, we also included all the cost. The bullet here talks about the construction cost, so we identified the design, the acquisition bid support, the construction and then the phase construction oversight cost, too, so I believe it is $14 million total, so half of that would be $7 million.”
City Manager Shawna Burkhart noted the last city she worked for drilled two wells that cost $13 million and $15 million, “so (the proposed cost) is definitely in the ballpark.”
The writer can be reached at delriomagnoliafan@gmail.com.
