A couple of weeks ago I took a tour of Geekdom, the "collaborative workspace where Entrepreneurs, Technologists, Developers, Makers, & Creatives help each other build businesses & other cool things together" – just in case you weren't clear what the hotbed of tech activity was all about.

Walking around their digs at the Weston Centre, my guide introduced me to Louis Pacilli, a transplanted New Yorker who came to San Antonio about eight weeks ago to head up the education wing of Geekdom at the request of Nick Longo, Geekdom's head geek. We talked, and Louis hit on a bunch of my hot button issues – community garden, high school mentoring, robotics, at risk schools – all in about five minutes of chit chat. Time for a follow-up interview with this guy.

City South Management Authority has caught nothing but hell since the City Council created it in 2005. Early on, many residents grew suspicious of its powers – some sweeping but imagined, others sweeping and real, like its land-use controls – and they remain wary. Developers have howled about its design requirements, which they say drive up construction costs. But the economy has dealt City South more political damage than all of the complaints combined.

SAWS raised its rates in late 2010, cut many of its expenses, and – thanks to the drought – sold more water than ever before last year. As you'd expect, the bottom line looked great, with the City-owned utility recording an after-expenses surplus of nearly $24 million in 2011. Balanced against ratepayers made a little poorer by their water bills, the result seemed to be good news for an agency that suffered losses totaling $67 million over the previous two years.

But its flush condition had more to do with good lawyers than good managers. Also, the news obscured SAWS' ongoing struggle to tame the cost of benefits for its retirees, and it came with the threat of future trouble – a potentially large settlement it might have to pay for violating the federal Clean Water Act. Both played into the rate hike approved by the City Council in December. And they'll likely turn up in future "rate adjustments" – alongside big money wired into the increases for long-term water supplies beyond the Edwards Aquifer.

SAWS may sell the cheapest water among Texas' big cities, but it's going to get a lot costlier.

The time of death for the controversial plan to build a $250-million water pipeline from Uvalde to San Antonio was a little after 11 a.m. last Friday. That's when SAWS emailed a news release naming four finalists for a huge long-term water supply contract. Southwest Texas Water Resources, which has been struggling to make its case for Uvalde water since 2008, wasn't on the list – and without SAWS as a customer, the project doesn't work.

STWR's plan was the latest, best-funded, and best-argued case for making water from Uvalde's western pool of the Edwards Aquifer available to San Antonio. In retrospect, however, it's surprising that the project's collapse took this long.