Council Weighs $5.9 Million for Aquifer Easements on 3,768 Uvalde Acres
Two Edwards Aquifer conservation easements go before Council on Oct. 29 on the consent agenda — Fush Creek Ranch at about $1,400 an acre and River Springs Ranch at about $6,800 an acre — buying the right to stop most building on the land, not the land itself.
The San Antonio City Council takes up two Edwards Aquifer conservation easements on Thursday, Oct. 29, items 16 and 17 on the A Session agenda. Together they cost $5,874,850.41, about $5.9 million, for 3,767.87 acres in Uvalde County, according to Puro SA's Oct. 26 report on the Oct. 29 packet, pages 30 to 33. Both sit on the consent agenda.
The city is not buying the land. It is buying the right to stop most building on it. The larger deal, Fush Creek Ranch (item 17), covers 3,656.93 acres over the aquifer's Recharge and Contributing Zones, from Fush Creek Ranch, LLC, for $5,117,983.90 — $1,507,396.29 from the voter-approved 2015 Proposition 1 sales tax fund and $3,610,587.61 from the San Antonio Municipal Facilities Corporation. The smaller deal, River Springs Ranch (item 16), covers 110.94 acres over the Recharge Zone, from Emery Venture Group, LLC, for $756,866.51, all from the Municipal Facilities Corporation.
The per-acre prices are lopsided, and the packet does not explain the gap. Fush Creek works out to about $1,400 an acre, while River Springs works out to about $6,822 an acre, almost five times as much. For Fush Creek, the memo gives an appraisal of $5,690,000, making the city's price about 10% under appraisal — a difference the memo describes as a significant bargain sale to the city. The River Springs memo gives no appraised value at all.
The draft Fush Creek easement, attached to item 17, grants the city an easement in perpetuity, with the stated purpose of minimizing the chance of materially impairing the quantity or quality of aquifer recharge. In practice it caps the ranch at most three parcels with two building envelopes each, at most six water wells, and at most 796,479.35 square feet of new impervious cover — about 18 acres, or about half of one percent of the property. The landowner keeps the land and keeps paying property taxes on it, and the easement creates no right of access to the general public. Puro SA reports reading only the Fush Creek draft, so those limits are Fush Creek's, not River Springs'.
Both properties were first flagged by the program's scientific GIS model, then visited, and the Edwards Aquifer Authority's geological assessments found River Springs offers high water quantity and high water quality benefit, while Fush Creek offers high quantity and very high quality benefit. Fush Creek sits across the Bear, Deep, Honey and Cherry creek watersheds, all tributaries to the Frio or Dry Frio rivers, and borders the 562.44-acre High Places Ranch easement the program bought in fiscal year 2022. The city's Conservation Advisory Board recommended Fush Creek on June 24, 2026, and River Springs on Aug. 26, 2026. Fush Creek alone will bring the program's protected total to 192,557 acres. What the packet does not say is how the two prices were negotiated, what River Springs was appraised at, or how much of the 2020 program's $100 million has been spent so far — and Council has not voted yet.
