Land Use · September 17, 2026 · Steven Owen

US 290 West utilities: water almost everywhere, wastewater almost nowhere

Water: one agency, one very large service area

The West Travis County Public Utility Agency — the PUA — is a political subdivision created under Chapter 572 of the Texas Local Government Code by concurrent ordinances of the City of Bee Cave, West Travis County MUD No. 5, and Hays County. It bought the old LCRA West Travis County Regional Water and Wastewater System in installments between 2012 and 2019 for an estimated $165 million, and it is funded entirely by service revenue rather than taxes. Its water system now covers roughly 225 square miles with more than 260 miles of pipeline, ten pump stations, eleven pressure planes, and two elevated storage facilities. The agency itself describes the system as hydraulically complex because the service areas are disjointed, transmission distances are long, and the topography varies — which is a polite way of saying that whether the PUA can serve your tract at your demand depends on which pressure plane you sit in, not merely on whether you are inside the certificated area.

Two practical consequences. First, the answer to “is there water?” is usually yes, but the answer to “is there enough water, at enough pressure, for a 200-unit project or a fire-flow-rated commercial building?” requires a service availability request and a capacity determination from the PUA’s developer services group, not a look at a CCN map. Second, the PUA is a wholesale supplier as well as a retail one. Belterra’s districts, for instance, are wholesale customers: they buy treated water from the PUA and from LCRA raw-water contracts and then operate their own internal distribution, meters and billing. If you are buying inside a district, your water counterparty is the district; if you are buying raw corridor land, it is the PUA.

Wastewater: the part that kills deals

This is where the corridor diverges sharply from what an out-of-market buyer expects. The PUA’s published service area exhibit is a water service area exhibit. Its wastewater assets are concentrated around Bee Cave and the old Lake Pointe plant, not strung along US 290. On the corridor itself, centralized wastewater exists in exactly four places, and each of them is a closed system:

Why the districts are effectively full — and why that is structural, not temporary

People hear “there’s a MUD next door” and assume capacity is a phone call away. Two things make that wrong on this corridor.

The first is legal. A municipal utility district or water control and improvement district is a political subdivision created for a defined district to finance and operate facilities for the land inside it. Its bonds, its rate base, its capacity allocations and its board’s duty all run to that district. Serving an outside tract is an exception that requires a negotiated out-of-district service agreement and, almost always, a finding that the district has surplus capacity it does not need for its own remaining buildout. On a corridor where every district still has undeveloped acreage in its own boundary, that finding is rare.

The second is physical, and it is the part people underestimate. These districts do not discharge treated effluent to a creek. They dispose of it on land — subsurface drip irrigation and reclaimed-water irrigation. Land application capacity is a function of how many acres of drip field you own and how much effluent per acre per day the soils and the permit will accept. You cannot add capacity by upsizing a pipe; you have to acquire and build more field. Hays County MUD No. 4 is doing exactly that right now: in July 2026 the district moved forward with a Phase 3 Drip Field Expansion adding new subsurface drip irrigation fields and upgrading pumping equipment, explicitly to “support continued growth while maintaining dependable wastewater service for District customers.” Read that sentence the way a land buyer should: the district is buying capacity for its own customers, and doing so is a multi-year capital project. That is what “full” means here. It is not a queue you can join.

The same land-application constraint shapes the City of Dripping Springs. The city’s South Regional Wastewater Reclamation Facility disposes by surface and subsurface irrigation, was permitted at 348,500 gallons per day under a 2015 amendment, and the city has pursued a substantial expansion since. Capacity there is real but finite, allocated through service agreements, and only relevant if your tract is in or can be brought into the city’s service area.

What this means for density

If your tract is not inside one of those four systems, your project is sized by an on-site sewage facility. Under Texas Commission on Environmental Quality rules in 30 TAC Chapter 285, an OSSF is designed around projected wastewater flow and the soil’s ability to accept it, permitted through the county acting as the authorized agent — Hays County or Travis County depending on which side of the line you are on. In practice, on Hill Country soils over limestone, this means low-pressure dosing or drip disposal, generous disposal-field area, and a design flow that grows with fixture count and occupancy. A restaurant pad is a different animal from a warehouse; a 40,000 SF multi-tenant retail building with two restaurants can need more disposal field than the site has room for once you subtract parking, detention and setbacks.

Layer on the Edwards Aquifer rules. Most of the corridor sits in the Edwards contributing zone, with recharge-zone areas nearby, and TCEQ’s Edwards Aquifer program in 30 TAC Chapter 213 requires an approved plan for regulated activities that disturb five acres or more, or that are part of a common plan of development of five acres or more. Those approvals take time and shape site design. The same geology that makes the corridor beautiful is what makes effluent disposal expensive.

The diligence list we run on every 290 tract

Before we price a corridor property for a seller or clear it for a buyer, we answer these in writing, not by inference:

The order matters. Water tells you whether you have a project. Wastewater tells you how big it can be. Impervious cover — which depends entirely on which jurisdiction you are in — tells you how much of the site you are allowed to build on at all. We covered that second half in five jurisdictions, five different answers on impervious cover.

How SCORE helps

Steven Owen is an Austin commercial real estate Agent who underwrites Hill Country land the way an engineer reads a utility exhibit: water, wastewater, impervious cover, then comps. SCORE maintains service-area, CCN, jurisdiction and floodplain data for every parcel in its Central Texas database, and we routinely get written service determinations in hand before a property is marketed — because a tract with a capacity letter is a different asset, and a different price, than a tract with a rumor. See development land and current listings.

Sources and dates: West Travis County Public Utility Agency, “Who We Are” (system overview, participating entities and LCRA acquisition history, accessed September 17, 2026); Hays County WCID No. 1 & No. 2 FAQ (Belterra water supply, wholesale relationship with the PUA and reclaimed-water irrigation); Hays County MUD No. 4, “Wastewater” and “Phase 3 Drip Field Expansion” (published July 6, 2026); Crossroads Utility Services, Hays County MUD No. 5 district page (wastewater-only billing, water via West Travis County PUA); City of Dripping Springs, South Regional Wastewater Reclamation Facility materials; Texas Commission on Environmental Quality 30 TAC Chapters 213 and 285; Texas Local Government Code Chapter 572. Capacity, service-area and permit status change — this is general information, not engineering, legal or investment advice, and every figure should be confirmed in writing with the utility before you rely on it. Related: 290 corridor impervious cover by jurisdiction · ETJ release case study · Buying land in the Austin ETJ.