GCWSD monitoring in question

As the debate over water quality at the Gonzales County Water Supply Corporation (GCWSC) comes to a boil, supporters point to a notice published in this newspaper on Dec. 19, 2014 acknowledging that the water company failed to perform all the required monitoring and/or reporting, but that omission does not mean the water is unsafe.

One customer recently announced in a letter to the editor that he would like fellow customers to join him in a class action lawsuit. GCWSC has invited him to a meeting Tuesday night to discuss the monitoring issue.

The letter to the editor claimed that the corporation had  “ignored their duties and failed to inform their customers of this serious breach of state regulations for well over one year, and that [they] had not received any notice.”

However, GCWSC posted a notice in the Dec. 19, 2014 edition of the Gonzales Inquirer addressing the issue and that they planned to correct the problem by obtaining correct addresses for sample sites — 40 of which are taken annually.

“In my 40 [samples], all of the sites were approved by TCEQ prior to us scouting the samples,” GCWSC Manager Barry Miller said. “So all the sites have an address.”

“Well, I didn’t look closely at every form, and there’s somebody at TCEQ who pores over these forms, because one address on FM 794 had two digits wrong, and a gentleman in Westhoff put down that he lived on one street when the sample site was on another. He lives at the corner of those two streets - so there were two violations.”

In the notice, GCWSC asked readers to inform other waters users of the violation by posting in a public place or providing copies of the notice.