If you tried to renew a WAQUA membership this year, you noticed something. The pool itself looked the same. The building off Bee Cave Road, adjacent to Westlake High School, hadn't moved. But the name on the invoice changed, and the entity collecting your payment is now Eanes ISD rather than the private operator most Westlake families had known for years. Fifty yards away, at the athletic building where the same families sent kids for football conditioning or cheer practice, almost nothing has visibly changed at all, even though ownership of that building quietly passed to the school district back in January.
These are two different stories that happen to share a parking lot. One got resolved this year. The other is still working itself out.
Both facilities trace back to the same public-private partnership model, and until last year, the same operator: Jeff Buch. In 2015, Buch built the 70,000-square-foot Westlake Athletic and Community Center himself, financing the construction in exchange for a lease running until January 2026, at which point ownership of the building would automatically transfer to Eanes ISD under the agreement's own terms. Five years later, using $4 million in restricted real estate funds layered onto the district's 2019 bond, Eanes ISD built the neighboring $10.3 million aquatics center and, in June 2020, signed a separate operating contract with Buch's other company, WAQUA LLC, to run it.
For most of the last decade, the two buildings functioned like a single amenity to the people who actually used them. Swim lessons and lap lanes at one, football conditioning and band rehearsal space at the other, both managed by the same team. That symmetry is gone now, and understanding why matters if you have a membership card in a kitchen drawer or a kid on a Westlake High School roster.
On April 10, 2025, Eanes ISD sent termination notices for both contracts on the same day, but for different reasons. For the aquatics center, the district pointed to repeated failures to keep the facility safe, clean, and adequately staffed, along with lapses in state and local safety compliance. For the athletic center, the reasoning was different: the district said it needed to reclaim part of the building for classroom and curricular use as enrollment needs shifted, not that the facility had been poorly run.
Buch's companies sued to block both terminations, filing petitions for permanent injunctions on April 30, 2025. Superintendent Jeff Arnett later described the decision to KVUE this way:
"It finally brought us to the point where we had no other option but to seek termination of the contracts."
By June 27, 2025, both sides agreed to pause the litigation through what's called a Rule 11 agreement, pushing the aquatics center's termination date to January 5, 2026, the same date already written into the athletic center's lease for the automatic ownership transfer. From that point forward, the two facilities stopped moving on the same track.
| Eanes Aquatics Center (formerly WAQUA) | Westlake Athletic and Community Center | |
|---|---|---|
| Contract status | Settled after negotiation; district took over daily operations June 1, 2026 | Ownership transferred in January under the original lease's automatic terms; the underlying dispute over management was not resolved by that transfer |
| Who runs it day to day | Eanes ISD, with memberships sold through Hometown Ticketing | The original management team, pending a new agreement with the district |
| What changed for users | A new annual membership term, pickleball added alongside lap swim | No publicly announced change to programming or access as of the district's most recent update |
| What hasn't changed | The building, the pool, the location | The building, the programs it hosts, the uncertainty over who runs it next |
The district's own FAQ makes an important distinction here that's easy to miss: the ownership transfer of the athletic center building was explicitly unrelated to the litigation and wasn't expected to affect it either way. Title moved because the ten-year clock in the original lease ran out. Who actually manages the building going forward is a separate question the lawsuit still has to answer.
For the aquatics center, the picture is settled enough to plan around. Memberships now run on an annual term from June 1 through May 31, purchased through Hometown Ticketing rather than a private membership office. The breakdown for an individual membership:
That totals $1,153 for an individual annual membership. A family membership runs $125 per month ($1,500 annually) plus the same $250 operations fee and a $15 processing fee for the family season pass, which works out to roughly $1,765 for the year. Access now includes both lap swim and pickleball, a combination the pool didn't offer under its previous operator. The district has also opened the facility to rentals for swim meets, camps, clinics, team events, and birthday parties, treating that outside use as a way to help cover operating costs rather than relying solely on membership dues.
If you're deciding whether to renew, the practical version of this section is simple: the price changed, the access expanded slightly, and the entity you're paying is now accountable to the school board rather than a private management company.
The athletic center's situation is less tidy, and residents who use it should know that going in. The facility has served as a hub for Westlake High School's football, soccer, cheer, and band programs, along with community sports and recreation, all without direct cost to the district under the original arrangement. That access hasn't stopped. What hasn't happened is a new operating agreement that would replace the terminated contract on stable footing.
The most recent public update from Eanes ISD, posted in January, said management would continue with the existing team while the litigation moved forward, and that the district's goal was to reclaim some weekday hours during the school day for instructional use without excluding student athletes or performers after hours. There's been no newer public statement through the district's usual channels since. For a family whose kids rehearse or practice there weekly, that means the building works exactly as it did last year, with no guarantee about what next year's agreement looks like.
The instinct to treat "the pool and the gym by the high school" as one story is understandable. They share a driveway, a founding operator, and a decade of history. But one of those stories has an ending: a settlement, a new operator, a published price list. The other is still being written, and the only honest thing to tell a neighbor asking about it is that nobody outside the district and the courtroom knows the ending yet.
If you have a membership renewal coming up, the aquatics center's new terms are public and worth reading in full on the district's own site before you pay. If your family's routine runs through the athletic center instead, the useful move this fall is simply to keep watching the district's news page rather than assuming this year will look like last year.
Westlake's daily rhythms rarely change all at once. This is one of those years where two buildings that used to move in step are proving that even neighbors under one bond program can end up on very different timelines.
If you're weighing what a home near this corner of Westlake actually means day to day, from school-year logistics to the amenities your family will actually use, Anna Morrison Lee has spent a career paying attention to exactly this kind of detail. Schedule a private consultation to talk through what's changing in the neighborhoods she knows best.
3825 Lake Austin Blvd Ste 501 Austin TX 78703
3825 Lake Austin Blvd Ste 501 Austin TX 78703
