It’s Not Dead Yet
Flood Control Still Pushing Costly, Destructive “Stabilization” Project on Buffalo Bayou
July 31, 2016
It’s a pointless, wasteful, ill-conceived, and maybe illegal project to rip up and raze trees and plants and wildlife habitat, dig up the banks, plug up tributaries, dredge and reroute the channel along one of the last natural stretches of Buffalo Bayou in Houston. This is a dreamy stretch of the river in the middle of the city, filled with beaver, otter, alligators, fish and flying creatures, and even edible plants. It flows for more than a mile past our great public Memorial Park, a natural detention area and significant geologic site that features very old high bluffs and sandstone formations. All of which would be obliterated.
And after almost three years of adamant public opposition, the Harris County Flood Control District is still promoting the project, which will cost the taxpayers at least $4 million plus, not including future costs of maintenance and repair.
It’s mystifying why they want to do this, why they think it would even work, why they don’t realize that the bayou would wash it away or that it would simply all slump away, as has happened in Buffalo Bayou Park downstream, where taxpayers are footing the ever-mounting bill for constantly repairing the banks dug up and stripped of trees and vegetation by Flood Control.
Do They Not Have More Urgent Problems?
Surely, the flood control district has more urgent problems that require our hard-earned tax money. Harris County is one of the most flooded places in the country. And this project, billed as a “stabilization” and “bank restoration” program, will do nothing to address flooding and could even make it worse. The county should focus on the hundreds of miles of channelized bayous and streams unwisely covered in now-aging concrete that should be restored to something more natural and beneficial.
The project, called the Memorial Park Demonstration Project, was first proposed in 2010 by the Bayou Preservation Association under then board chair, Kevin Shanley, landscape architect and principal with SWA Group, the firm responsible for the ugly, obtrusive bridges, collapsing sidewalks, poorly-functioning dog park and non-functioning faux Hill Country fountain and stream in Buffalo Bayou Park.
This map prepared by the Harris County Flood Control District shows the areas to be excavated (yellow) and filled (orange) in the proposed Memorial Park Demonstration Project. Note also the rerouting of the channel. Memorial Park and the Hogg Bird Sanctuary, including a tributary, are on the north, with houses in between. The entire south bank is River Oaks Country Club golf course.
It’s for the Birds
Report on Plans for the Hogg Bird Sanctuary on Buffalo Bayou
May 11, 2016
First the positives about the presentation Monday evening, May 9, by the Houston Parks Board about plans for the little-known 15.56-acre nature preserve on Buffalo Bayou known as the Hogg Bird Sanctuary.
The sanctuary at the end of Westcott Street south of Memorial Drive is probably better recognized as the mostly impenetrable woods next to the parking lot for the Houston Museum of Fine Arts’ Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, located across the bayou, accessible by a footbridge. Bayou Bend is the former home of the Hogg Family, who developed River Oaks and in 1924, along with partner Henry Stude, sold at cost to the city the 1,503 acres that became Memorial Park. (The Hogg Brothers also sold to the city at cost 133.5 acres of land intended to be part of Hermann Park. In 1943 the city sold that land for the establishment of the Medical Center, which provoked the continuing ire of their sister, Ima Hogg.) Ima Hogg, a cultural and civic leader and one of the city’s most revered philanthropists, donated the family house and gardens to the museum in 1957 and then donated to the City of Houston the woods on the north side of the bayou as a nature preserve.
The mouth of the tributary and ancient bluffs in the Hogg Bird Sanctuary on March 18, 2016. This tributary once flowed to the east across the upper part of the nature preserve into the bayou. Photo by Susan Chadwick
Ima Hogg a Defender of Nature and Public Parks
Ima Hogg, who died in 1975, was also an ardent conservationist, early civil rights activist, mental health activist, and defender of park space for the public, in particular Memorial and Hermann parks. In her letters to city officials over the years, available in the archives of the Museum of Fine Arts, she described her firm belief that woodland parks should be kept as natural as possible and criticized in a 1964 letter to then Mayor Louie Welch, who famously thought public parks unnecessary, the “alarming situation” of rapidly diminishing park areas in Houston and “throughout America,” including through construction in the parks by “worthy institutions” that really ought to look for building sites elsewhere, she wrote. Miss Ima was still angry that the city had “relinquished so much of the acreage” in Memorial Park for highways and a golf course and in an earlier letter to then city director of public works, Eugene Maier, demanded that the money the city received from the state for the highway land be used to acquire and improve additional park sites. Let’s guess that probably didn’t happen.
Proposed Roads to Damage Katy Prairie Preserve
Urgent Notice of Public Meeting and Comment Deadline
May 1, 2016
Updated May 3, 2016
The Katy Prairie Conservancy has announced that the Harris County Engineering Department has corrected the email link for commenting on proposed changes to the Harris County Major Thoroughfare and Freeway Plan that will damage the Katy Prairie.
The correct email address is:
us290amtstudy@hcpid.org
Update May 8, 2016
The comment period has been extended until May 13.
The Katy Prairie Conservancy has sent out an urgent notice of a Harris County plan to build new roads in and around the Katy Prairie Preserve. The preserve is a nonprofit land trust project to restore and protect historic wetland prairie in Waller and western Harris counties.
Buffalo Bayou originates in the Katy Prairie. Prairie wetlands, rapidly being destroyed and paved over by development, are vital for clean water and flooding mitigation, as are forested riparian zones along the banks of streams such as Buffalo Bayou and its tributaries.
When, Where, and How
The Harris County Engineering Department is holding a public meeting Monday, May 2, 2016, on proposed changes to the Major Thoroughfare and Freeway Plan (see particularly pages 25 through 29) that will “degrade the Katy Prairie Preserve System,” according to the conservancy.
The meeting takes place from 5:30 to7:00 pm at the Hockley Community Center, 28515 Old Washington Road, in Hockley, Texas.
The conservancy urges that if you cannot attend the meeting, please submit your comments in writing by May 13, 2016, via email to us290amstudy@hcpid.org or by mail to:
Harris County Engineering Department
10555 Northwest Freeway, Suite 120
Houston, Texas 77092
Attn: Fred Mathis, P.E.
Proposed future development map of roads crisscrossing the Katy Prairie Preserve. Map from page 27 of the Harris County Engineering Dept. US 290 Area Major Thoroughfare Study.
The conservancy says that while Harris County is proposing to dispense with parts of the one-mile road grid through some of the preserves, the county also recommends constructing new roads in sensitive and/or inappropriate areas.
Here are some of the conservancy’s main objections:
- In general, the plan does not effectively take into consideration the importance of the Katy Prairie preserves in reducing flooding, improving water quality, providing wildlife habitat, and offering recreational opportunities for the residents of the Greater Houston area. Roads should go around the Katy Prairie preserves and not through them. Roads can move, nature cannot.
- KPC does not support the new proposed east-west road through the upper third of the Warren Ranch; it will cause fragmentation and impair ranch operations.
- KPC does not support the new proposed north-south road through the conservation easement lands owned by KPC’s conservation easement donors; this land provides sensitive habitat and flood protection as well as other environmental benefits. It should be protected.
- A number of the proposed new roads, if built, would be under water during flood events if the most recent flood event is any indication of where floodwaters go on the prairie.
For more information visit http://www.katyprairie.org/
Crazy Widespread Disappearance of Wetlands around Houston
Wetlands in Buffalo Bayou Threatened Too
Aug. 3, 2015
The Army Corps of Engineers is not keeping track of whether developers are replacing tens of thousands of acres of wetlands lost to development in the Houston region as required by law.
Wetlands, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, “are part of the foundation of our nation’s water resources and are vital to the health of waterways and communities that are downstream. Wetlands feed downstream waters, trap floodwaters, recharge groundwater supplies, remove pollution, and provide fish and wildlife habitat.”
Under the federal Clean Water Act, the Corps of Engineers is charged with protecting our wetlands.
A study by the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), reported by the Houston Chronicle Friday, July 31, 2015, found that “more than 38,000 acres of wetlands vanished in greater Houston over the past two decades despite a federal policy that ‘no net loss’ can be caused by encroaching development.”
Wetland photo by John Jacob, director of Texas A&M University’s Coastal Watershed Program, published in the Houston Chronicle, July 31, 2015. Printed with permission of John Jacob.
What Flood Control Is Not Telling Us
“Maintenance” Road Planned Along Bulldozed Bank
June 4, 2015
Updated June 8, 2015. See below.
Updated June 7, 2015. See below.
The Harris County Flood Control District is planning to create a 12-foot wide pathway for maintenance vehicles along the graded bank of Buffalo Bayou in Memorial Park.
The maintenance road parallel to the bayou is not included in the plans to “restore” the wild banks of the bayou submitted to the Army Corps of Engineers by the flood control district.
The district revealed the plan for what it is calling a “Monitoring Access Zone” at an invitation-only meeting Tuesday, June 2, 2015. The meeting was one of a series to develop a planting plan for the $6 million “erosion control,” “bank restoration,” “water quality improvement,” “flood conveyance” project known as the Memorial Park Demonstration Project. Apparently the planting plan is not progressing well, as at the meeting the district proposed planting tall fescue, an invasive exotic almost impossible to control. Tall fescue has been the scourge of Texas prairies for several decades at least.
“Tall fescue forms a near-monoculture and is responsible for the loss of otherwise undisturbed prairie remnants throughout Texas and the Midwest,” reports one of our landscape ecologists.
Well, so much for the district’s native plant expertise and commitment to a native-only riparian forest.
This beautiful tributary extending deep into the center of Memorial Park is labelled a “gully” by the flood control district. It will be plugged. Photo by Jim Olive on March 25, 2015.
No trees, no “better than ever” riparian forest
Little is known about the previously undisclosed but long-suspected “Monitoring Access Zone.” According to a source who was at the meeting, the 12-foot wide pathway will be planted with some sort of seed mix for several years until the district is certain the “restored” banks will hold. They won’t hold, of course, so this grassy, flat “access zone” is likely to be permanent.
Which means no trees, no “better than ever” riparian forest and wildlife habitat, banks bulldozed and leveled even through the so-called “no-work zones.”
What is Federal Jurisdiction
The district explained at the meeting that it was not required to reveal the “monitoring” road to the Army Corps of Engineers because it does not impact federal waters, presumably because the road will be above the Ordinary High Mark, which is the lateral limit of federal jurisdiction.
But it will not be above the OHWM, which in a significant section of the park extends deep into the forest as part of the flood plain, a natural detention area, including swales and wetlands, all of which are under federal jurisdiction. The road and the “bankfull bench” upon which it will sit will also fill and block at least two tributaries, which also are under federal jurisdiction, although on its plans the district labels both tributaries “gullies,” thereby attempting to remove the tributaries from federal jurisdiction. (See sheets 16 and 18.) Gullies are classified as an “erosional feature” by federal law. An actual gully leading from the South Picnic Loop parking lot is oddly labeled a “tributary.” (See sheet 16.)
So far we don’t know the length of “Monitoring Access Zone,” whether it extends along the entire north bank of the project area, including private property, or whether a “Monitoring Access Zone” will also be built on the south bank of the project, land which belongs to the River Oaks Country Club.
Guess we’ll have to ask the flood control district. And object to the Corps.
What else is the flood control district not telling us?
Snowy egrets flying past another tributary adjacent to the middle meander in Memorial Park, also labeled a gully by HCFCD. The banks here will be bulldozed, and the bayou filled in and a new channel cut further south through River Oaks Country Club property. Photo by Jim Olive.
Update June 7, 2015
There is no “road” planned for maintenance vehicles on the wild banks of Buffalo Bayou targeted for “restoration” by the Harris County Flood Control District.
Jason Krahn, manager for the district’s controversial $6 million project to “improve” one of the last natural stretches of Buffalo Bayou, wrote in an email to Save Buffalo Bayou on June 5 that “there is no road proposed for the post construction monitoring activities associated with MPDP [Memorial Park Demonstration Project].”
Participants in the district’s Vegetation Advisory Workgroup for the dredging and channelizing project had been told that for several years after “restoration” there would be a grassy 12-foot wide “Monitoring Access Zone” for maintenance vehicles to access the bulldozed and reconstructed banks of what is now a perfectly healthy historic natural area in need of no monitoring or maintenance whatsoever–other than picking up the trash and mitigating runoff from trails and parking lots.
This “Monitoring Access Zone,” workgroup participants were told, would remain in place until there was no longer any need for monitoring, replanting, watering, removal of noxious invasive vegetation, or repairs to failing “stabilized” banks, etc. Presumably removal of noxious invasive vegetation would not include the tall fescue, a noxious invasive plant, described above, that the district earlier this month was contemplating planting. Responding to objections, the district reportedly has changed its mind about the tall fescue.
Krahn said that monitoring activities would take place on both the north and south banks of the bayou in the project area, which includes Memorial Park and the Hogg Bird Sanctuary on the north and the River Oaks Country Club on the south.
He also wrote that “no work zones” on the bayou were in fact “no work zones,” despite the fact that heavy equipment would be driven over the banks, according to the district’s plans. However, above the Ordinary High Water Mark these “no work zones” would not be graded into bankfull benches, wrote Krahn, because “these are portions of the project area that already have the necessary geomorphic characteristics for a sustainable, stable channel.” A bankfull bench is a flat or sloping area above the bank of a stream that slows overflowing floodwater.
Asked to clarify the “Monitoring Access Zone,” Krahn has not yet replied.
But it’s not a “road,” Krahn insisted. So we won’t call it a “road.”
How about sendero?
Updated June 8, 2015
Project Manager Jason Krahn has clarified the “monitoring access zone.” In an email to Save Buffalo Bayou Monday morning, Krahn wrote:
“To provide for the monitoring access as outlined in the Atkins report [the post-construction monitoring plan included in the revised permit application], the District is working to define the appropriate spacing for vegetation within a portion of the flood plain planting zone. A spacing of 12-foot in width is currently being considered to allow for this access, or ‘monitoring access zone’ as you’ve referenced it in your previous email correspondence.”
Immutable Plan. Invisible Rocks.
“Revised” plan to destroy Buffalo Bayou not really “revised” at all.
Project manager says no significant changes to much criticized original plan.
No sandstone in project area, says flood control, contradicting itself.
June 3, 2015
Invisible ancient sandstone in project area at 29°45’35.8″N 95°25’58.6″W. Photo by Bill Heins.
Despite the hundreds of comments criticizing the purpose, methods, impact, cost, benefit, and harm of Harris County Flood Control District’s proposed “erosion control” project on Buffalo Bayou in and around Memorial Park, the district has made no significant changes to the plans recently re-submitted to the Army Corps of Engineers.
Jason Krahn, project manager for the controversial Memorial Park Demonstration Project, told Dianna Wray of the Houston Press that the district was “simply following the guidelines” and that there were “no significant changes” to the original project plan.
Indeed, many of the “revised” plan sheets posted by the Army Corps of Engineers on its website appear to have been simply relabeled with new dates, though there are some with new details.
The public has until June 5 to send comments to the Corps about the district’s “revised” permit application and the district’s responses to previous comments. There is no limit on the number of comments one can make. So if you’ve already made a comment, make another!
The Blinged-Out Master Plan for Memorial Park
City Council Quality of Life Committee Should Send Expensive, Overdone Master Plan Back to Drawing Board
March 24, 2015
The Memorial Park Conservancy is sending its $3.2 million unfinished master plan for Memorial Park to the Houston City Council’s Quality of Life Committee on Wednesday, March 25. The plan is so far a gaudy, overstuffed mish-mosh of bad, hazy, contradictory, wrong, and incomplete ideas developed apparently with the main goal of spending some $200-300 million, half of it public money.
The committee should reject this tacky, impractical document and consider directing hundreds of millions of dollars towards the purchase of new parkland instead.
Among other things, the plan misleadingly describes Buffalo Bayou as it flows along Memorial Park as “altered.” A slide shown at the final presentation of the plan to a packed audience at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston March 9 outlined the bayou in bright red and identified it as “altered Buffalo Bayou.” (See slide 18.)
We were stunned. Reasonable people would assume that “altered” meant channelized, dug up, scraped, engineered, rebuilt, etc. by humans or machines. In fact, the bayou flowing past Memorial park is one of the last unaltered stretches remaining in the city.
But no, “altered” in this case means “changed over time,” explains Shellye Arnold, executive director of the park conservancy. The bayou has adjusted to increased water flows from increased runoff due to development and paving; therefore the bayou is “altered,” says Arnold in an email.
The conservancy is developing the ten-twenty-thirty-year plan with the Houston Parks and Recreation Department and the Uptown TIRZ 16, which is funneling our tax money into the blinged-out project. It’s not clear who is in charge of the master plan, or even who is now in charge of Memorial Park, for that matter.
Central Texas limestone entryway proposed for Houston’s Memorial Park. Image from Memorial Park Conservancy.
The Memorial Park Master Plan and the Survival of Buffalo Bayou
Sept. 20, 2014
Nobody wanted to mention the strange plan to bulldoze our wild Buffalo Bayou in Memorial Park and they wouldn’t let us put out our flyers at the Memorial Park Conservancy meeting in the El Dorado Ballroom on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2014, to introduce the beginnings of a new master plan for the park. The previous master plan in 2004 recommended that this last remaining stretch of wild bayou be left alone as a valuable educational tool about nature and its dynamic process. The conservancy, a private, non-profit organization charged with protecting and preserving the 1500-acre park, has decided to ignore that recommendation and supports razing the riparian forest, dredging, channelizing, rerouting, and destroying the ecosystem of this stable, functioning reach of the bayou. Because.
Well, few people understand what the purpose of this bizarre project is, and we have talked to some certified geniuses about it. Proponents call it erosion control, flood control, invasive species control, “restoration,” but none of it explains the massive amount of destruction planned or why they are using long-discredited channelizing methods that likely will result in more erosion, more flooding, and the whole artificially reconstructed bayou washing out, along with whatever native vegetation they plant there.
Topographic map of Buffalo Bayou on the southern edge of Memorial Park, 2013.
The BPA’s sympathetic, holistic, natural plan to destroy Buffalo Bayou
June 23, 2014
About twenty people, including City Council member Oliver Pennington, were at the monthly meeting of Super Neighborhood 22 last Thursday to hear the Bayou Preservation Association argue in favor of its bizarre plan to destroy Buffalo Bayou. The BPA and the Memorial Park Conservancy are in cahoots with the Harris County Flood Control District to do what the county has long wanted to do: strip and channelize some of the last remaining natural segments of Buffalo Bayou.
The BPA’s natural, sympathetic, holistic plan to help Buffalo Bayou be all it wants to be.
Yes, it is difficult to believe. The BPA was founded long ago to prevent this very thing from happening, and the MPC also took over the mission of Miss Ima Hogg and others to preserve and protect Memorial Park. The project they have helped create and eagerly promote would bulldoze the vegetation and trees from most of both banks along nearly 1.5 miles of the bayou as it flows past the Hogg Bird Sanctuary and Memorial Park on the north and the River Oaks Country Club golf course on the south. It would rechannel the bayou, grade the banks, plant them with Bermuda grass, destroy the scenic tributary of the Hogg Bird Sanctuary as well as the very, very old high bluff that overlooks it, and a lot more.
But it will all be done in a “holistic” way, with regret and great sympathy and understanding for what the bayou really wants to be, and also it will be gluten-free, although alas, not animal-cruelty free, as most of the creatures, including fish, beaver and otter, dragonflies and hawks, will have to sacrifice their habitat.
Your Time Is Up: Cohen Cuts Off Criticism of Costly Memorial Park Plan
What’s the Rush?
Full Council to Consider Unfinished $3.2 Million Plan Wednesday, April 1
Public Comments to Council on Tuesday, March 31
March 29, 2015
Update Monday, March 30: Council Member Steve Costello’s office has responded that as a member of the board of directors of the Memorial Park Conservancy, he will recuse himself from voting on the proposed master plan.
Update Thursday, April 2: Houston City Council unanimously approves $3.2 million master plan for $200-300 million landscaping of Memorial Park over next 20-30 years.
Public comments were limited to two minutes due to the large number of people signed up to speak on the city’s proposed master plan to spend $200-300 million on Memorial Park. A few of the nine members of the council’s Quality of Life Committee, chaired by Ellen Cohen, met last Wednesday afternoon to hear Parks Director Joe Turner and landscape architect Thomas Woltz present the ambitious, vague, and costly master plan for the 1500-acre-plus woodland park.
Dozens of people spoke in favor of the plan. Most of them were members of the board of or connected to the Memorial Park Conservancy, and many of them, users of the park, gave moving testimony about their reasons for joining the conservancy: the devastating impact of the 2011 drought, which has killed more than half the trees in the park.
But there were also strong critics of the unfinished $3.2 million proposal, which so far does not seem to be an actual written plan specifically identifying and prioritizing what should be done and when, two key elements for a successful master plan, according to a recent report on urban park conservancies from the Trust for Public Land.
A large contingent of critics were residents or property owners adjoining the park concerned about the increase in traffic, noise, lights, and people using the park. A smaller group of conservationists also expressed concern about the increase in traffic and parking, the loss of trees and natural areas, the expense, inappropriate planting plans, and lack of detail about costs and maintenance. It was suggested that new facilities be placed instead in new parkland purchased with some of the millions of public dollars to be used for the project.
The new master plan proposes to increase parking by thirty percent. However, the 2004 master plan for the park, much of which has never been carried out, identified parking lots as “undesirable intrusions on the natural landscape” and recommended “no net change to the quantity of daily use parking spaces” in the park. To manage peak demand, the 2004 plan recommended the use of shuttles and the construction of “an ‘over-flow only’ parking using environmentally sensitive construction techniques along the rail and power line right of way.”
Read the rest of this story.
Springtime on a tributary of Buffalo Bayou in Memorial Park. Photo by Jim Olive on March 25, 2015.