Lake Austin's Fall Drawdown: A Working Guide for Waterfront Owners

Waterfront Notes · Lake Austin

On October 12 the Lower Colorado River Authority will begin lowering Lake Austin about ten feet, and it will hold there until refill starts on November 24.

For owners between Mansfield Dam and Tom Miller Dam, this is the first chance since 2017 to stand on the lakebed under their own dock. The dates you have seen published are not the dates you can work.

The lake comes down at no more than about a foot a day starting October 12, and LCRA expects roughly three weeks to reach its target of 481.8 to 482.8 feet above mean sea level. Normal operating range is 491.8 to 492.8.

Refill begins November 24 at up to two feet a day, released from Lake Travis, and the lake is back in its normal range by November 30. Public boat ramps are closed throughout, and there is no swimming at Emma Long.

The City asked LCRA for the drawdown, in its own words, "in response to stakeholder requests."

As for how rare this is: a City memo to Mayor and Council dated October 10, 2025 counts eight drawdowns between 2001 and 2011, and exactly one since.

Plan as though the next one is far off, because on that record it is.

Seven weeks are on the calendar. You do not get seven weeks.

The lake descends at roughly a foot a day and takes about three weeks to bottom out, then refill begins November 24. Full exposure runs from around the start of November to Thanksgiving week.Descent and refill rates as published by LCRA, August 20, 2026. Curve shape is illustrative.

A subtlety in that curve should drive your scheduling: exposure is progressive.

The top of a bulkhead is dry in the first week. The bottom of a silted slip may not surface until the lake is nearly at target. Cap and upper-wall repairs can start early. Dredging and footing work waits on the last two feet — the feet the schedule is least certain about.

First, the thing that trips people up: LCRA controls the water, the City controls the shoreline.

LCRA permits docks on Buchanan, Inks, LBJ, Marble Falls and Travis, and says on its own page that the City is responsible for Lake Austin dock regulations. The agency lowering your lake is not the one that will approve your repair.

City of Austin Development Services. Governing code: LDC Ch. 25-2, Subchapter C, Article 13.

Read that middle row twice. The exemption removes the site plan, not the permit — and it evaporates the moment you replace a load-bearing element.

A piling is load-bearing. If your builder finds rot in a pier once the water is down, your project has changed tiers in the middle of a three-week window.

The announced accommodation is a dedicated Site Plan Exemption application for minor dock and bulkhead repairs during the drawdown. The City says it will be available "in the coming weeks." As of this writing it has not been posted — watch AustinTexas.gov/Boat-Docks.

Get a volume estimate before October. That number decides whether this drawdown is a work window, or simply a very good look at a problem you will be solving in 2027.

And if your scope involves fill rather than removal, the Army Corps of Engineers regulates that under Section 404. The City's own dock handout sends applicants to the Fort Worth District.

The City's announcement notes in passing that some activities may require Texas Parks and Wildlife permits. Two provisions underneath that sentence are where well-intentioned owners are most likely to break state law this fall.

Vegetation

Managing nuisance aquatic vegetation in Texas public water generally requires a treatment proposal filed with TPWD at least fourteen days before work begins, under the State Aquatic Vegetation Plan at 31 TAC 57.932.

There is a lakefront landowner exception, narrower than it sounds in two ways. It reaches only floating aquatic plants — and hydrilla is rooted and submersed. It also does not extend to persons hired solely to remove vegetation, or to anyone using a mechanical harvester. The exception most likely to be invoked this fall does not cover what most owners will actually do, which is hire a crew.

Zebra mussels

TPWD classifies Lake Austin as fully infested. Moving a vessel, dock or pier with zebra mussels attached is illegal in Texas.

TPWD's boat maintenance movement notice is the exception: notify the department at least seventy-two hours before moving one to a service provider for removal or repair. The general regulation text is written around boats while the notice form names docks and piers explicitly — so if you plan to float a dock section out for shop work, call TPWD rather than rely on this paragraph.

A great many people wanted this drawdown for the hydrilla. It is worth being straight about what it will and will not do.

The lake carried 575 acres of hydrilla and 75 acres of Eurasian watermilfoil at the June 2026 survey. That is a real problem, and in parts of the upper lake it has made summer boating close to impossible.

Lowering the lake is unlikely to fix it — and that is not my opinion. The City's October 2025 memo reviewed data from 1999 through 2025 and found that drawdowns "are not effective at controlling hydrilla," and that the record suggests they may "have the opposite effect, facilitating hydrilla's growth by reducing competition from other aquatic plants in shallow areas."

The City requested one anyway, on maintenance grounds, while noting it does let owners plan localized mechanical removal near their own shoreline.

So the honest framing is narrow. This window is an opportunity to clear what is in front of your property — not a lake-wide treatment. And if that is the plan, re-read the vegetation rules above before hiring anyone. For the fuller picture, I wrote about it separately in Hydrilla on Lake Austin.

One more, for owners with no planned scope: use the window anyway.

Nine years is a long time to defer inspection on the most expensive structure between your house and the water. Undermined footings, corroded hardware, a slip gone quietly from adequate to marginal — cheap to find in November, expensive later.

Owners who have been here a while remember drawdowns as a January event. That changed after February 2021.

In LCRA's words, following Winter Storm Uri it "determined it would no longer conduct lake drawdowns in the winter to help ensure the hydroelectric generators at dams along the Highland Lakes remain available to fully support the Texas power grid during the cold winter months."

The scale is smaller than most assume. Mansfield is rated at 108 megawatts and Tom Miller at 17; all six Highland Lakes dams come to roughly 295, against an ERCOT peak above 91,000.

Not a criticism — capacity during a scarcity event is not valued in proportion to its nameplate. But it is worth knowing the size of the constraint that moved your maintenance window out of quiet January and into hunting season, the holidays and the end of the construction year.

I will resist the usual move. There is no credible published study of a Lake Austin waterfront premium — the percentages circulating in brokerage material trace back to nothing, and Texas is a non-disclosure state, so even the sale figures everyone quotes come from MLS reporting rather than public record. I am not adding another invented number to that pile.

What I can tell you is structural, and more useful anyway. Under Article 13, dock scale is governed by shoreline frontage, not acreage. Width is capped at 20 percent of frontage, with a 14-foot minimum for lots with 70 feet or less. Footprint is capped at 1,200 square feet, extension at 30 feet, side setbacks at 10 feet, and slips at two motorboats.

Which is why the condition and permit status of what sits at the water's edge does real work in a transaction. A dock that is sound, registered and documented as permitted is a different asset from one that is none of those things on an identical lot. This window is one of the few chances to move a property from the ambiguous column into the documented one — whether you sell in five years or never.