Trump Administration Rule Could Worsen Flooding by Removing Protections for Our Wetlands

By Jordan Macha and Kristen Schlemmer, Bayou City Waterkeeper

Houston Chronicle, Jan. 29. 2020

By removing protections to local wetlands under the Clean Water Act, the Trump administration’s new Waters of the United States rule exposes our region to new flood risks.

Throughout the Houston metro area and out to the coast, wetlands play a key role in protecting against floods, while also providing wildlife habitat and filtering surface water that makes its way into the city’s drinking water supplies. With Texas made up of mostly privately-owned land, rules to protect these natural landscapes, and the benefits they offer to the public, matter.

The change poses the greatest threat to the eastern parts of our region, where relatively pristine expanses of wetlands remain intact — including around Trinity Bay, the San Jacinto River’s East and West forks and Cedar Bayou. As the Grand Parkway continues to be built out to the east of Houston into Liberty County, these wetland-dense areas will be especially vulnerable to rapid development, particularly under the administration’s new rule, which amounts to a rollback. Without any other rules to place common-sense limits on this development, these remaining wetlands may be lost.

Read the rest of this article in the Houston Chronicle.

Court Rules that Century-Old Oaks Can Be Razed for Water Pipeline in Katy

Water Pipeline is Part of 39-Mile, Billion-Dollar Project to Bring Water from Lake Houston to West Side of Town

By Karen Zurawski, Houston Chronicle, January 24, 2020

[Here are the board members of the North Fort Bend Water Authority: heavy on engineers and real estate developers. And here is how to contact them.]

 

North Fort Bend Water Authority has obtained a judgment in its civil lawsuit filed in Fort Bend County Court of Law No. 3 against a south Katy-area landowner that gives it a 20-foot wide easement to install a pipeline — overriding an attempt to preserve 100-year-old Live oaks as well as some other older trees.

The water line is part of a larger project. The water authority, created in 2005 by the Texas Legislature, is building infrastructure as part of a multi-agency billion-dollar project to have people switch from using groundwater, which causes subsidence, to using surface water as required by the Fort Bend Subsidence District (FBSD.) …

As part of that conversion, the authority is working with other entities to bring water from the Trinity River to Lake Houston where it will be treated at an expanded Houston northeast water purification plant. The treated water then will travel via an 8-foot diameter pipeline to west Harris County and North Fort Bend County. The West Harris County Regional Water Authority and NFBWA are sharing the costs for that 39-mile pipeline.

Read the rest of this report in the Houston Chronicle.

Robert Fontenot stands in front of Live oaks planted in the early 1900s on his Katy property. Photo by Karen Zurawski for the Chronicle.

Trump Administration Scraps Clean Water Rule Aimed at Protecting Streams, Wetlands

 

“Reducing protections for wetlands is a recipe for disaster when the next Harvey, Imelda, or other heavy rainstorm that has become a regular part of living in this region of Texas, comes our way.” — Jordan Macha, Bayou City Waterkeeper

 

By Perla Trevizo, Houston Chronicle, Jan. 23, 2020

The Trump administration has finalized a clean-water rule that it says strikes a balance between protecting the environment and the economy, but critics say the change will put Houstonians at greater risk for flooding and threaten the drinking water for more than 11.5 million Texans.

The rule announced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency eliminates Clean Water Act protections for up to half of the nation’s wetlands and one-fifth of the streams across the country under a narrower interpretation of which waterways qualify for federal protection.

Court challenges had led to the Obama-era rule being put on hold in Texas and 27 other states. Still, Anna Farrell-Sherman, a clean water associate with Environment Texas, said the return to less-stringent rules will leave waterways from Barton Creek to Galveston Bay vulnerable to pollution and degradation.

Read the rest of this report in the Houston Chronicle.

 

Pine Brook Wetlands park in Clear Lake, Texas. Photo by Mark Mulligan for the Houston Chronicle.

Houston’s Density Revolution Is Just Beginning

And Will Help With Houston’s Flooding and Traffic Problems

 

By Kyle Hagerty, Bisnow Houston, January 9, 2020

 

For decades, Houston has been the poster child of urban sprawl, growing to nearly 670 square miles. That story is changing. Years of work from the city and redevelopment authorities are finally paying off, as high-density, mixed-use projects break ground all across the Houston urban core.

“We’re early in the urbanization cycle,” Ziegler Cooper Senior Principal Scott Ziegler said.

Even more importantly, Ziegler sees Houston’s return to our inner core as part of the solution to Houston’s chronic flooding issues. “Quite honestly, I think if we hadn’t expanded out to the suburbs so quickly, we wouldn’t have near the problem. Those developments are the ones flooding the bayous,” Ziegler said. “If Houston had girdled its growth, we would have preserved prairie, pasture and forest lands for drainage. Suburban development has really taken away our drainage capacity.”

Ziegler knows it is a controversial opinion that could get him in trouble, but he said he stands by it. “When we build in the city, we have to have retention. We’ll put in underground tanks and detention infrastructure. In addition to that, we’re going even more vertical, two feet above the 500-year flood plain. Before it was two feet above the 100-year flood plain.” Houston’s lack of zoning may make headlines, but high-rise and mixed-use development in Houston’s inner city is more stringent than single-family home development on the city’s unincorporated, vulnerable edges. As millions flocked to Houston suburbs, local officials ignored stricter building regulations, allowing developers to pave over crucial acres of prairie land that once absorbed huge amounts of rainwater, according to investigative reporting from the Texas Tribune. At the crossroads of gentrification, traffic and flooding, Houston’s densification is one of the most important trends in the city. With the city continuing to grow at a rapid pace, building a resilient and attractive city will be the responsibility of the city’s developers and architects — and they are just getting started.

Read the rest of this article in Bisnow Houston.

 

Good News: More Land Preserved on the Katy Prairie Northwest of Houston

Land Protected Near Cypress Creek

Katy Prairie Conservancy Acquires 636-acre Tract Off Pattison Road

January 15, 2020

By Shawn Arrajj, Community Impact

Officials with the Katy Prairie Conservancy announced Jan. 14 the organization has acquired 636 acres off Pattison Road in the heart of the Katy Prairie.

The conservancy is a nonprofit land trust that works to protect and restore prairie acreage by both acquiring land and working with area landowners through voluntary conservation easements. The KPC already owns about 18,000 acres in Harris and Waller counties that officials said serves as a home to hundreds of species of wildlife as well as native grasses and wildflowers.

The 636 acres, located east of Pattison Road between Hebert and Morrison roads, is located within a part of the prairie that KPC officials described as “of highest priority for conservation.”

“Protecting this area is of great urgency as these lands are heavily utilized by migratory birds such as the sandhill crane and the long-billed curlew,” officials said in a Jan. 14 press release. “If these lands are lost to development, birds will have nowhere to stop for the night and could disappear from Houston forever.”

Read the rest of this report in the Houston Cy-Fair Community Impact Newspaper.

 

The Katy Prairie Conservancy has acquired 636 acres of land referred to as the Pattison Tract. Image courtesy the Katy Prairie Conservancy and Community Impact Newspaper.

 

Wild and Scenic Film Festival

 

Jan. 12, 2020

Bats fishing. Boys and butterflies. Girls on glaciers.

The Wild and Scenic Film Festival, North America’s largest environmental film festival, returns to Houston’s historic River Oaks Theater Jan. 28 and 29.

The touring festival of short films is always exciting and enlightening, providing Houstonians with eye-opening insights into new places, new adventures, and new research and ideas.

The festival features ten short films, with different films shown each night from 7 to 9 p.m.

Here’s how to buy tickets.

The popular event is sponsored for the sixth straight year by the Citizens Environmental Coalition, founded almost fifty years ago by a group of women active in environmental causes and quality of life issues. Among them was Terry Hershey, who helped save Buffalo Bayou from being channelized and lined with concrete like White Oak and Brays bayous.

The festival was started almost forty years ago by activists in California determined to protect the South Yuba River. It is now the focus of nearly 250 events around the country.

Watch the 2020 film festival trailer.

 

Image from the Wild and Scenic Film Festival courtesy of CEC

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A Frosty Reception on Buffalo Bayou

The Bend in Winter

 

Jan. 12, 2020

The grass sparkled with a rare sugary frosting as we walked across the picnic grounds of Memorial Park towards the woods of Buffalo Bayou. It was late December. Jim Olive was in town, and we were headed to photograph that bend in the bayou we’d been documenting throughout the seasons for almost six years now.

The pale morning sun slanted through the trees, highlighting the field of frost. It was below average cold, starting out in the 30s. We’d had to look for mittens and woolly stuff.

Trails Not Trails. Laws Not Laws.

Whoops! What’s this? We stopped. Our path into the woods was blocked. Wire-fenced off and a big green sign posted in English and Spanish: “This is Not a trail. Do not enter! Destroying public property is a prohibited by Title 19, Chapter 191, of the Government Code of Texas.”

 

Sign and fence on an “unofficial” trail in Memorial Park, Dec. 19, 2019

 

Hmm. Well, it turns out this is Not a law either. More about that later.

To continue, we continued. The clanking, grinding sounds of heavy machinery rang through the wintry woods. Next we found that the soaring loblolly pine snag, long dead, had been cut down. It had been standing tall for years, slowly decaying, providing habitat and sustenance for wildlife. We counted the rings. At least 70-80 years old. The massive felled log lay across the trail that was Not a trail, blocking our path. The name “Jesus” carved into its side years ago was still faintly visible. We went around.

Read the rest of this post.