By Eleni Himaras
reporter@ltview.com

Lakeway Municipal Utility District officials hope a pilot program can help some of the district’s heaviest water users to cut back their usage as conservation becomes more and more important.
“I think some homeowners may not know that they could use less water,” General Manager Richard Eason told the board at their meeting last week.
Accord Irrigation Technologies will be doing water audits on 10 of the top water users in the district to analyze if there are any leaks, how much water is being used and how much water needs to be used.
After the 10 audits are done, Eason will report back to the board with the success of the program and they will decide on pursuing it further.
“Those people that spend a lot of money are smart enough to know that they are spending it and are going to spend it anyway,” board member Kay Andrews said, skeptical of the program being able to curb water use.
Eason said that there was a good chance that the finances of those users may be handled by an accountant and that the homeowner may not know how much they are spending or how much they could save.
Since the pilot program is within Eason’s $5,000 expenditure limit, it did not require board action and but they gave him toe go-ahead to pursue the 10-audit test.
The board also continued to make strides in its goal of transparency, agreeing on a list of things to be posted on the web site, updating a chunk of their policies and agreeing on a monthly financial report to be read at regular meetings.
“The suggestion has been made that part of our transparency might be to include other items and financial items [on our web site],” Eason said.
The board had charged member Jerry Hietpas with putting together a list of things to post and while he was unable to attend the meeting, Eason read out the list, which included a history of the MUD, the annual budget, the annual audit, the balance sheet, the incoming expense report, orders, resolutions and policies, awards, pictures of the facilities, an explanation of the rates, a rate comparison, the water conservation plan, the drought contingency plan and the site map itself.
At last month’s meeting, the board decided to review all of its resolutions and policies, five at a time, in the coming months. In tackling the first five, the board voted to make several minor changes to update them and decided to make a monthly financial report part of the general manager’s report each month.
“The revenues come in irregularly because of the weather,” said Eason, adding that this could make a monthly report over a yearly report misleading.
“I’d rather have someone ask me a question of why than think they are not getting all of the information,” board president Tom Rogers said.
Utilizing the most recent policy update that allows citizens to place an item on the agenda with the approval of two board members, Mel Neese led a discussion on the continued contract with the public relations firm Elizabeth Christian and Associates.
“These are your friends and neighbors that you have to look in the eye and say, I’m spending $7,500 a month to get into your good graces,” Neese said.
Board member Tom Priddy said he believed that retaining this firm was all part of the transparency effort to get more information to the public and that the MUD alone was not equipped to do so.