Oddly enough, Patricia Scheumack, the local businesswoman who made it her personal crusade to clean up an area spring, never imagined the simple act of bailing pebbles and rocks from a nearby aquifer-fed spring would have such an impact on the tiny village of Salado.
But it has, and people who don’t even live in Salado have something to say about it.
“I think this place needs to be preserved in as original condition as possible,” said Waco businessman Timothy Watson.
Watson comes down frequently for the serenity and because it is where he met his fiancée.
“There is a spirit of tranquility here,” he said.
Two weeks ago, Scheumack and some of the area merchants in Salado began displaying a petition in shops demanding the village clean up the mess they made when they buried one of the springs that feeds the village’s primary attraction, they said.
Rebecca White, who manages the Sweet Nut Things shop, can see the Sirena statue that sits adjacent to the buried spring from a window in her shop.
Like Watson, she doesn’t live in Salado, but she does have an opinion about what has happened so far and what needs to happen.
“To me, a natural spring is extremely important,” White said. “In an era of global warming, I can’t imagine filling in a spring. It’s water. Why would you block any source of water?”
White said Mayor Merle Stalcup and the village made a rash decision by filling in the spring without looking at other alternatives.
However, Tyler Fletcher, who owns and operates a bookstore on the edge of town, said Scheumack should have just left the spring alone because he and others tend to believe the spring is located on private property.
“Would anybody else be cleaning the springs?” Fletcher asked.
The property was surveyed in July and the property line stops several feet short of the bank of the creek, which has been deemed a U.S. waterway by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
While who owns what may be the subject of discussion within the village, what is indisputable is that what has happened is a product of change.
“Things that nobody thought about twice, 10 or even 20 years ago, these are now issues,” Fletcher said. “These are modern issues that a little country village has to deal with. The issues are real now, when they never were before.”
Fletcher said the issue surrounding the spring could ultimately be a job the board of aldermen could be forced to deal with sometime in the very near future.
“I guess when you think about how many people come to Salado and how many people visit the springs in town . . . maybe these issues, we’ll have to re-examine them,” Fletcher said.
