Small New Lots Near Austin Can Now Permit Far Less Well Water Than Older Ones
At an Oct. 16 rulemaking hearing of the Barton Springs-Edwards Aquifer Conservation District (BSEACD), Shani Armbruster, entitlements manager for MileStone Community Builders, said the proposed rules would cut the pending 500-acre-foot groundwater request for Hays Commons, the company's planned community at FM 1626 and SH 45, by 97 percent. An acre-foot covers one acre a foot deep, about 326,000 gallons. She expected the application to be grandfathered, meaning processed under the old rules, and asked the board to confirm it, the Hays Free Press reported.
After an executive session, legal counsel Brian Sledge recommended moving the cutoff from Sept. 19 to Oct. 16, and the board adopted the amendments 5-0, effective that day. Applicants like Hays Commons, which had applied but hadn't yet filed for a production permit, will be processed under the previous historical provisions, Sledge said. "I don't think that's something that the board had to do, but the board decided to do it."
For land outside the pipeline, Oct. 16 is now a line. In the district's Trinity Aquifer zones, a lot created on or after it can't get the Limited Production Permit, the district's standard permit for small wells, and in the Middle and Lower Trinity its permit ceiling works out to about 27 gallons a day for each acre its owner controls.
What the district adopted
A groundwater conservation district is a local agency that permits and limits well pumping. This one covers parts of Travis, Hays and Caldwell counties (BSEACD) and regulates the Trinity Aquifer beneath this part of the Hill Country as three management zones layered by depth: the Upper, Middle and Lower Trinity.
Resolution No. 101626 sets up the new Trinity permit system. A nonexempt well, one state law doesn't excuse, needs a district production permit. A Historical Trinity Production Permit keeps the old rules' protection, which the resolution calls Historic Use Status. It covers permits approved before Oct. 16 and those approved later on applications the district had accepted as administratively complete by then. Every other new authorization, and every increase by a historic user, issues as a Conditional Trinity Production Permit.
A conditional permit's volume is the production allowable, the per-acre cap on permitted pumping, times the applicant's contiguous controlled acreage, the connected land it controls. Production already authorized on the same acreage and zone, under other permits or from exempt wells, is subtracted. An acre can be credited only once per zone, "to avoid double-dipping," the resolution says.
The initial allowable is 10,000 gallons per acre per year in the Middle and Lower Trinity and 5,000 in the Upper Trinity. The board may lower both to meet the aquifer's long-term goals, down to a floor tied to those goals. The resolution calls the figure "a ceiling and not an entitlement," and Sledge said "we've adopted these higher values for now." New nonexempt Upper Trinity wells are limited to domestic or livestock use.
A plat is the recorded map dividing a tract into lots, and a replat redraws one. Under the resolution, "subdivision or replatting on or after October 16, 2026, creates no additional acreage or production allowable."
Permits run no longer than a year. If a conditional permittee's controlled acreage shrinks until its authorized volume exceeds the per-acre allowable on what remains, the permit renews at the lower volume. The permittee must report the reduction within 30 days and seek an amendment if it causes an overage.
The Limited Production Permit
The resolution also narrows the Limited Production Permit, which the district grants by rule for limited pumping. In a Trinity zone it's now available only for a tract "platted, excepted from platting, or otherwise lawfully conveyed before October 16, 2026, and not further subdivided," one permit per tract. Applications filed on or after Oct. 16 are capped at 125,000 gallons a year and 10,000 gallons a day of pumping capacity.
By the board's finding, the plat date serves only as a basis for "well spacing, tract size, and groundwater production limitations," and the provisions "do not regulate zoning or the subdivision of land." Nothing in the resolution limits how many lots a tract may be divided into, only the permit volume those lots can claim.
The district holds a 20-year federal incidental take permit for the endangered Barton Springs and Austin blind salamanders, issued with its 2018 Habitat Conservation Plan. The board found the amendments consistent with both, part of the federal layer under local rules.
The arithmetic, on a hypothetical tract
It takes 12.5 acres of Middle or Lower Trinity ceiling to equal the Limited Production Permit's 125,000-gallon cap, and 25 in the Upper Trinity.
A hypothetical 100-acre Middle Trinity tract, one owner, no wells or permits. The owner could seek a conditional permit of up to 1,000,000 gallons a year, eight times that cap. That's a ceiling the board acts on, not a volume anyone holds.
Cut it into forty 2.5-acre lots after Oct. 16, ignoring roads. A buyer controlling only one lot could seek at most 25,000 gallons a year, about 68 a day. Forty of those ceilings add back up to 1,000,000, because the acres didn't change. What the lots lose is the Limited Production Permit: each was created after Oct. 16, and the parent tract, once subdivided, no longer qualifies either.
Drought cuts further. Curtailment, a mandatory monthly cut, is set by drought stage, which the district declares as conditions worsen. Stage 2 Critical and Stage 3 Exceptional Drought cut historical and conditional permits 30 percent. Stage 1 cuts conditional permits 20 percent. A 30 percent cut running all year would take a lot's 25,000 gallons to 17,500. The district can also lower the per-acre figure itself as a drought adjustment.
The district was in Stage 3 as of its Aug. 13 board meeting (Hays Free Press, Aug. 2026). In northwestern Hays County, a neighborhood well drilled in 2003 went dry in 2025, and Radiance residents spent more than six months on a single well under a boil-water order (KUT, Mar. 26, 2026).
Drawdown is the drop in water level pumping causes around a well. A Trinity well drilled or modified on or after Oct. 16 must sit at least 100 feet from the nearest property line, and farther if needed to hold drawdown at the line to 5 percent of the available drawdown, the most the level there could drop. Drawdown there is computed by the Cooper-Jacob method over 36 hours of pumping. The well must also sit at least 200 feet, or twice the property-line distance if greater, from any existing or previously approved well screened in, or drawing from, the same zone. Spacing can be varied. The per-acre allowable on a conditional permit can't.
What the line doesn't reach
Applications already in
The resolution also gives holders of Trinity drilling authorizations approved before Oct. 16 a time-limited election to take a historical permit, capped at the annual pumpage in their drilling application. Neither the resolution nor the press coverage says which route, if either, Hays Commons is on.
Historic status isn't immunity. Historical permits take drought curtailment, an increase or change of use goes conditional, and one shrinks acre by acre when someone else is authorized to produce from its acreage.
Hays Commons had already been to the county. On June 9, the Hays County Commissioners Court denied a development agreement for the roughly 340-acre project (Community Impact, June 2026). According to agenda documents, the agreement would have allowed 346 single-family lots served by a centralized Lower Trinity well. Without it, the documents described more than 100 individual, privately owned wells drawing from the Edwards Aquifer and more than 100 septic systems.
County Judge Ruben Becerra and Commissioners Debbie Ingalsbe and Morgan Hammer voted to deny rather than wait 30 days, as Commissioner Walt Smith, the item's sponsor, had proposed. "We don't have the tools to stop it here in Hays County," Smith said.
Exempt wells
Texas Water Code §36.117(b)(1) exempts from district permits a well used only for domestic, livestock or poultry use, on a tract larger than 10 acres, that can't produce more than 25,000 gallons a day. Subsection (c) says a district "may not restrict the production" of that well, and the resolution doesn't. It counts such wells instead, in the conditional formula.
Subsection (j) removes the exemption for a well supplying water to a subdivision that requires plat approval under Local Government Code Chapter 232, the county platting chapter for land outside city limits. The statute's text doesn't say whether each lot owner's own domestic well counts.
Utilities
A retail public utility stays inside the formula. Its contiguous controlled acreage is its service area, set by its certificate of convenience and necessity (CCN) or its corporate boundary. For spacing, a utility may treat that boundary as its property line, with a 1 percent drawdown limit at existing wells.
Before the per-acre formula
On July 29, 2019, the board voted 5-0 to permit Needmore Water LLC to pump 289 million gallons a year from the Trinity (Hays Free Press, 2019). "This is the most difficult permit this district has ever had," Director Mary Stone said. Needmore's permit predates the new rules, and its current terms aren't in the coverage.
The board said the amendments "prevent the duplicative allocation of limited groundwater availability to the same acreage" and help give landowners over the Trinity "the opportunity to produce their fair share of groundwater."
What a new lot can draw
A new lot here means one created on or after Oct. 16 in the Middle or Lower Trinity, 10 acres or smaller, with no earlier permit or application. It's too small for an exempt domestic well and ineligible for a Limited Production Permit, so a new well on it can get only a conditional permit. The ceilings below assume the owner controls only that lot. The Upper Trinity rate is half.
| Lot size | Middle/Lower Trinity, gal/yr | Middle/Lower, about gal/day | Upper Trinity, about gal/day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2.5 acres | 25,000 | 68 | 34 |
| 5 acres | 50,000 | 137 | 68 |
| 10 acres | 100,000 | 274 | 137 |
The Limited Production Permit's cap is about 342 gallons a day. Each figure is a starting ceiling. The board acts on each new production permit, weighing its effect on existing permits and registered exempt wells, and drought curtailment then takes 20 to 30 percent.
A lot cut on or after Oct. 16 that is 10 acres or smaller gets a district permit ceiling sized by the acres its owner controls, and older undivided tracts keep access to the larger Limited Production Permit until they are divided.