Denton moves forward with protesting proposed sewer plant for a lagoon community in Sanger
By Christian McPhate Staff Writer for Denton Record-Chronicle
The hopeful news arrived, recently, in an email like an early Christmas gift to property owners on the outskirts of Denton and Sanger who have been fighting to keep a proposed sewer plant — for a new development known as the Sanger Laguna Azure — from appearing near their land and negatively impacting the environment.
In September, their neighbor Jim Horn, a former Texas House representative, and Dallas developer Megatel filed a permit application for the facility with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. They reported the sewer plant would discharge no more than 950,000 gallons of treated wastewater into creeks — which property owners said are already prone to flooding. The sewage would come from Megatel’s proposed mixed-use development that could have up to 7,000 homes and a 26-acre artificial lagoon if the project is approved for construction.
Property owners have filed 109 comments, 29 requests for a public meeting and 11 requests for a contested case hearing with TCEQ as of December 30, 2024.
“We are ahead of the game, most of us have submitted our comments already but we need to continue to ask people to send in their comments,” Kathy Dodd, who’s been organizing the property owners, said in the email.
Dallas, Denton and Sanger also share the property owners’ concerns. The proposed plant will be located within Sanger’s Certificate of Convenience and Necessity, which the state grants for water and sewer services, and violates the city’s platting standards, according to a staff presentation to the Denton City Council on December 17, 2024.
Both Dallas and Sanger are protesting the permit application with TCEQ, in part due to the lack of levels identified for phosphorus in the discharge that will impact the watershed of everyone downstream.
“So most of these smaller regional plants are designed for specific developments and most of them are able to stay under that 1 million gallon daily rate, which negates their responsibility to mitigate the impact of introducing the [discharged] water into the watershed,” Kyle Pedigo, planning and division manager for water utilities, told Denton City Council members during the meeting.
The council directed city staff to move forward with an ordinance that will grant the city manager or their designee (i.e. the water utilities department) the ability to file protests against permit applications for sewer plants without council approval.
“This is something that is just needed,” council member Vicki Byrd said. “... We’ve got to give you guys some leeway to manage this. The county is growing like mad, and having these other entities having these other entities coming in and putting us in a position to be unsafe and not having the health part to it, I just cannot imagine saying no to something like that.”
The ordinance will return to council for a vote after the holidays.
Pedigo stressed that they need the ability to do file protests since there’s only a 30-day window to protest a permit application after TCEQ Executive Director Kelly Keel issues a preliminary decision on an application for a sewer plant.
“Granting this protest authority allows us to maintain flexibility and to protest these permits before that window closes,” Pedigo said.
Keel hasn’t issued a decision yet. Pedigo said it could happen at any time. Then the “shot clock” starts ticking. If they miss the deadline, the city would lose the ability to protest the permit application.
Shortly after the council’s direction, Dodd sent an email and wrote to property owners: “I know we feel like we have gotten an early Christmas present with Denton’s decision to protest the Sanger Laguna and Jim Horn sewer plant application, and we have. I don’t mean to be the sewer grinch but this isn’t over.”
Watershed impact
Since June 2024, six permit applications have been filed with TCEQ for sewer plants that will impact Denton’s watershed if the state agency approves them, and they include the Sanger Laguna Azure, Sundance Wastewater and D.R. Horton-Texas, Pedigo told council members.
Several were close enough, Pedigo said, for Denton to accommodate in the regional system that the water utilities department has been developing, including Megatel’s Sanger Laguna Azure.
However, Megatel has declined to connect to an existing water system, according to the city’s staff presentation.
Megatel hasn’t responded to the Denton Record-Chronicle’s requests for comment.
Pedigo told the council that Denton has heard from property owners in Rainbow Valley and Whitehawk communities, both of which will be impacted by Horn’s and Megatel’s sewer plant. They shared concerns about negative environmental effects from adding too much discharge to creeks that already flood when it rains. They are also worried about how it will impact the wildlife and told the Record-Chronicle last month that part of Rainbow Valley is a wildlife refuge.
In early December, about two dozen property owners attended a Sanger City Council meeting to share those same concerns with council members.
Mayor Thomas Muir told them they couldn’t discuss the proposed sewer plant but were familiar with the proposed plant and the developer behind it, and he assured them they were on the same page about not wanting it in their extraterritorial jurisdiction.
Sam Alexander, whose property will be affected by the plant, attended the Sanger council meeting and figured that Megatel might walk away from the development if its permit application for a sewer plant fails.
“If their only option is to hook up with the Sanger or Denton sewer system, it could take years,” Alexander said in an email Wednesday. “First of all Sanger would have to enlarge their sewer plant and install multiple lift stations. Then comes the issue with getting an easement. They would have to go through Rainbow Valley, the Badie property and the Falls property. All of which would be hard and expensive to obtain. To hook up to Denton would be extremely expensive and difficult.”
Regardless of the expense, Pedigo pointed out that the proposed sewer plants don’t align with the city’s 2023 Wastewater Master Plan, which takes a regional approach to wastewater treatment with three water-reclamation plants strategically located on the outskirts of Denton in the Pecan Creek, Clear Creek and Hickory Creek basins.
Adopted by the Denton council in May, the master plan calls for all facilities to use membrane bioreactor technology to create what Pedigo called “high-quality effluent prior to discharge.”
The technology uses microorganisms to break down pollutants and organic-based polymeric membranes to separate solids from liquid.
At the December 17th meeting, Pedigo showed the council a map of nine existing local water-reclamation plants discharging effluent over a widespread area of creeks and rivers near Denton’s watershed, including Big Sky, Tabor Ranch and Stonehill Ranch, all of which discharge just under a million gallons of treated wastewater, according to the presentation.
Pedigo mentioned three concerns about these plants:
Increased flow in creeks far upstream of lakes limits stormwater carrying capacity. Water reclamation plants under 1 million gallon discharge are not responsible for mitigation.
Potentially lower-quality effluent causes bacterial concerns in local creeks that flow toward Denton water supply intakes.
There is no opportunity for beneficial reuse of the water.
“Through the regional system, we would collect the wastewater and transport it to our regional plant, where it would be treated and discharged, in most cases, closest to the lakes so it would have less of an upstream impact,” Pedigo said Tuesday. “Where these localized solutions [sewer plants] are spread around, and when they discharge — if they’re producing a low-quality effluent [treated sewage], it has a wider-ranging effect, basically, on the entire waterway from where it gets discharged to where it enters the lakes.”
Watershed hope
Although Dallas, Denton and Sanger are protesting the permit application, that doesn’t mean TCEQ will deny Horn and Megatel’s permit, Pedigo told the council.
“Permits are often unlikely to be denied by TCEQ due to protest, but these matters can vary from permit to permit,” Pedigo said.
In the staff presentation, Stephen Gay, Denton’s general manager of water utilities and street operations, wrote that protesting the permit application allows the city to voice concerns and possibly influence conditions of TCEQ’s approval in hopes of mitigating negative impacts from local sewer plants appearing in extraterritorial jurisdictions around North Texas.
Gay also wrote that it provides an opportunity for the city, the property owner and the developer to find mutually beneficial agreements, similar to what occurred with TCCI Utility, in which the developer abandoned its proposal for a sewer plant in favor of connecting to the city’s system.
“Our preference would be a regional solution,” Gay told the council. “We would prefer not to have these smaller package plants scattered throughout our watershed.”
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