About $1,400 an acre. That is what San Antonio would pay to keep a 3,656.93-acre ranch in Uvalde County mostly the way it is, for good.
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. Both sit on the consent agenda. Together they cost $5,874,850.41, about $5.9 million, for 3,767.87 acres in Uvalde County.
The city isn’t buying the land. It is buying the right to stop most building on it.
The two deals
The agenda memos are in the Oct. 29 packet, pages 30 to 33.
- Fush Creek Ranch (item 17): 3,656.93 acres over the aquifer’s Recharge and Contributing Zones, from Fush Creek Ranch, LLC, for $5,117,983.90. Of that, $1,507,396.29 comes from the voter-approved 2015 Proposition 1 sales tax fund and $3,610,587.61 from the San Antonio Municipal Facilities Corporation.
- River Springs Ranch (item 16): 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 math is mine, and it is lopsided. Fush Creek works out to about $1,400 an acre. River Springs works out to about $6,822 an acre, almost five times as much. The memos don’t explain the gap. The River Springs memo gives no appraised value at all.
For Fush Creek, it does. The appraisal was $5,690,000, and the memo says paying less than that results “in a significant bargain sale to the City of San Antonio.” The difference is $572,016.10, about 10% under the appraisal.
What the city gets
The draft Fush Creek easement, attached to item 17, grants the city an easement “in perpetuity.” Its stated purpose is “to minimize the chance of materially impairing the quantity or quality of aquifer recharge.”
In practice, the draft caps what can happen on the ranch:
- at most three parcels, with two building envelopes each;
- at most six water wells;
- at most 796,479.35 square feet of new impervious cover (roofs, pavement and the like), which the document says approximates half of one percent of the property. That is about 18 acres.
The landowner keeps the land and keeps paying the property taxes on it. And no, primos, this is not a new park: the draft says the easement “creates no right of access to the general public,” except as the document expressly provides.
I read only the Fush Creek draft for this story, so the limits above are Fush Creek’s, not River Springs’.
Why Uvalde County?
The memos describe the program’s mission as protecting recharge water quality and quantity over the aquifer’s Recharge and Contributing Zones, and they say changes in state law let it buy outside Bexar County.
The memos say both properties were first flagged by the program’s scientific GIS model, then visited. The Edwards Aquifer Authority’s geological assessments found River Springs offers high water quantity and high water quality benefit, and 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 it 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.
Where the money comes from
This program has been around for 26 years. According to the memos:
- May 2000: voters approve Proposition 3, a 1/8-cent sales tax of up to $45 million, for land over the aquifer. It runs through 2005 and is limited to Bexar County.
- 2005, 2010, 2015: voters extend it as Proposition 1, and changes in state law let it buy outside Bexar County.
- 2020: Council approves a 10-year, $100 million program through the San Antonio Municipal Facilities Corporation, which issues debt to keep buying.
That is why one deal mixes two funds: leftover 2015 sales tax money and borrowed money. The memo says Fush Creek alone will bring the program’s protected total to 192,557 acres.
What we don’t know yet
The packet doesn’t say 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. Council hasn’t voted yet.
To speak on either item, sign up at SASpeakUp.com. The agenda says registration closes 15 minutes before the 9 a.m. meeting starts.
Stay hydrated, stay curious, stay off 410 at 5pm. — Nico