Gloves Coming Off: The BPA Has Lost Its Way on Buffalo Bayou
June 25, 2014
Our response in the Memorial Examiner to Robert Rayburn, president of the Bayou Preservation Association
Over time, the mission and purpose of citizens’ organizations can erode and change course. Tragically, this is the case with the Bayou Preservation Association, founded in 1966 “to protect the natural beauty” of Buffalo Bayou against the bulldozers of the Harris County Flood Control District.
In a 1984 KUHT documentary, BPA founding member Terry Hershey warned that we must always be vigilant because the HCFCD would always try to find a way to strip and channelize our southern, slow-moving bayou and turn it into a drainage ditch. How shocking that the BPA itself is now promoting a Harris County project to bulldoze nearly 1.5 miles of our last remaining wild bayou in the middle of Houston in order to do just that.
Ted Oberg Investigates Project to Destroy Buffalo Bayou: Stubborn Old Cliffs Taking Too Long to Erode
June 25, 2014
Harris County Flood Control District Director Mike Talbott Says He Could “Sleep Just Fine” If Project Doesn’t Go Ahead.
A pretty good report from Channel 13 investigative reporter Ted Oberg that aired yesterday. HCFCD Director Mike Talbott is quoted as saying that those magnificent thousand-year-old cliffs on the bayou are a “scientific sign that the bayou is trying to change course.”
Since those cliffs haven’t changed much in over a century, apparently the bayou is taking way too long to change course and the county is going to speed things up by bulldozing the cliffs, digging new channels in the bayou, and ripping up all those trees that keep falling in the water and “clogging it up.”
Talbott is also quoted as saying the bayou is trying to change course by “eroding the land at the water’s edge” at the bottom of the cliffs while the tv shows what looks like a lot of sand deposited on the bank at the bottom of the cliff. That would be sand from upstream, where most of the sediment comes from (according to the HCFCD’s permit application to the Army Corps of Engineers).
But watch for yourself and decide. And thanks, Ted Oberg, for paying attention.
(Sorry, below is a screenshot of the stubborn bluff from the television report. You can’t punch the arrow to make it move.)
Thousands-year-old cliff taking way too long to erode away. County will bulldoze it instead.
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.
Sierra Club to Present Findings on County Claims of Improving Ecology of Buffalo Bayou
June 12, 2014
Is there ecological benefit to Harris County’s plan to bulldoze the wild banks of Buffalo Bayou in and around Memorial Park? Will our beautiful southern bayou be improved? Common sense says no, but the Harris County Flood Control District says yes. What is the truth?
The flood control district in its permit application (warning: big pdf file but see page 451) to the Army Corps of Engineers claims that there is “ecological lift” from their project to “restore” the bayou by stripping riparian forest and vegetation from both banks and parts of the Hogg Bird Sanctuary and digging up, filling in, and reconfiguring our 18,000-year-old bayou, one of the few natural reaches of the river remaining in the city.
The Houston Sierra Club arranged for a hydrologist and a biologist to analyze the county’s evidence outlined in the permit application that Buffalo Bayou will be improved through “ecological lift.”
On Wednesday, June 18, the public is invited by the Houston Sierra Club to a presentation on the results of its investigation into these amazing claims by the Harris County Flood Control District. There will be a visual exhibit of the project area showing the value of Buffalo Bayou as a natural resource.
The presentation will be at the United Way Community Resource Center, 50 Waugh Drive, Houston 77007.
Refreshments will be served at 6:30 p.m. The program begins at 7 p.m.
Buffalo Bayou at sunrise as it flows past Memorial Park on the left and River Oaks Country Club on the right. Photo by Frank Salzhandler.
Does this look like ecological improvement to you?
If we don’t destroy Buffalo Bayou now, it will “fall in on itself.”
June 12, 2014
Informative article by David Theis in the Texas Observer June 10 about the project to destroy Buffalo Bayou in order to “restore” it. Includes some wild claims by the executive director of the Memorial Park Conservancy that “the bayou is going to fall in on itself” if we don’t bulldoze it first. Yes, as difficult as it is to believe, not only does the Memorial Park Conservancy officially support this nonsensical plan to destroy the riparian forest in Memorial Park (even if all its members don’t), the organization even helped create it. It’s almost as if they think Memorial Park has too many trees or something.
Please note that the project length is 6,600 linear feet along the bayou, plus another 800 feet in a lovely tributary of the Hogg Bird Sanctuary, not 5,800 feet as reported in the article. (We know it’s hard to keep up: the Harris County Flood Control District keeps changing its plans.) However, the 18,000-year-old bayou will end up 800 feet shorter if the county and its odd allies have their way.
Also that magnificent high bluff in the bird sanctuary is not in any part a result of recent erosion, unless your time frame is several thousand years. The county plan would dig up most of that beautiful tributary you see from the top of the bluff and fill in our amazing high precipice somehow. Why? Because, erosion! Next project: the Grand Canyon.
Below is the county’s map of the riparian areas to be excavated and filled in. Yellow is “cut” and orange is “fill.”
Read the Texas Observer article.
And here is an earlier excellent article from the Texas Observer in 2002 questioning the interests of some of the movers and shakers behind the Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s development of Buffalo Bayou east of Shepherd. Some of those names are familiar. Like Mike Garver, a member of the board of the Bayou Preservation Association and a property owner on Crestwood Drive whose bayou frontage is being “restored” by the taxpayers in this project promoted by the BPA. Garver, former chairman of the Buffalo Bayou Partnership, is CEO of BRH-Garver Construction, whose major clients include, oh, look, surprise, the Harris County Flood Control District, the Army Corps of Engineers, the City of Houston, and KBR, the engineering contractor for the project.
Harris County’s 2013 map of where they plan to dig out Buffalo Bayou and fill it in. Yellow is excavate. Orange is fill in. On the south bank is the River Oaks Country Club golf course. On the north is Memorial Park, some private homes, and the Hogg Bird Sanctuary.
Save Buffalo Bayou on KPFT Progressive Forum
June 5, 2014
Listen to Evelyn Merz defend Buffalo Bayou from Harris County’s bulldozers with Progressive Forum host Wally James on KPFT. The program aired on 90.1 FM on Thursday, June 5, from 7 to 9 p.m. Merz is conservation chair of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club. Her segment starts around the 50 minute mark.
Buffalo Bayou riparian forest. Photo by Ann Stautberg.
Yes, We have Rocks in Houston. And No, That’s Not a Problem: That’s a Beautiful Pleistocene Cliff.
May 31, 2014
Floating down Buffalo Bayou past Memorial Park with only clear ground springs trickling through the fine sand and bright red clay banks. We put in last Friday morning under the Woodway Bridge, as they were spraying turf grass on the ugly drainage project that replaced the nature trail that used to exist downstream of the bridge. Led by a small white egret, with mockingbirds and cardinals calling in the trees and graceful herons crisscrossing in front of us, we floated with Memorial Park on our left all the way to the Shepherd Bridge.
This is a short video of the riparian forest the Harris County Flood Control District plans to destroy so that they can “restore” it.
What you can see when they are not flushing the 18,000-year-old mother bayou with sediment-laden water from the failing Addicks and Barker dams is: rocks. Yes, we do have rocks in Houston. Beautiful gray stone tables and ledges, huge slabs of ancient flat sandstone, mostly broken, alas, in a purposeful, barbaric act of destruction by the Harris County Flood Control District. Some years ago they drove a huge-wheeled crushing machine down the banks. Why? Who knows? Maybe they thought breaking up gajillion-years-old stone slabs would slow the water. Maybe they just don’t respect the bayou or our natural history.
But enjoy while you can the intricate, woven roots of boxelders, towering sycamores, and willows holding the historic banks together; the sparkling, natural springs surrounded by tiny green liverwort, seeping out of the layered red clay.
And regard the high Pleistocene cliffs we have here on the prairie. And no, that hard-packed cliff is not about to collapse or fall in the water. That’s what nature looks like, ladies and gents. According to the people who know this bayou well, that old cliff has been there like that for more than forty-five years, or maybe thousands.
See for yourself. This video is just under eight minutes long. If you want to watch a longer, fifteen-minute movie with informative dialog and text, you can find it here. Watch both!
Red clay bank and riparian forest on Buffalo Bayou. Memorial Park on the left.
A Good, Lively Meeting
May 26, 2014
We had a good, lively, informative meeting on Thursday, May 22, about Harris County’s plan to bulldoze 14.35 acres or almost 1.5 miles of riparian forest on both banks of Buffalo Bayou as it flows past Memorial Park, the River Oaks Country Club, and the Hogg Bird Sanctuary. Around 200 people attended, including Harris County Flood Control District Director Mike Talbott, who was accompanied by his communications manager, Kim Jackson. It was a diverse crowd in St. Stephen’s Pecore Hall and included worried residents who live along the north bank of the bayou between the bird sanctuary and the 1,500-acre public park. Also birdwatchers, tree huggers, lawyers, engineers, academics, mountain bikers and poets, landscape architects and urban planners, a uniformed employee of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and people from across the political spectrum. This is an issue that is drawing passionate support from conservatives and liberals and people who are neither or some of both
As one conservative activist has commented: “If there is anything that upsets me more than destroying the environment, it’s doing it with taxpayer money.”
Mr. Talbott was called to take the mic when a member of the audience asked the question that is perplexing many people: Why? What is the point of this hugely destructive project?
The dotted red lines show the 14.35 acres of riparian forest to be scraped and bulldozed. According to the HCFCD, 80 percent of the vegetation in the targeted area will be removed. Note the areas to be cleared of trees extends into the interior of Memorial Park towards the maintenance facility. This is for access by heavy equipment to the bayou.
Article in The Chronicle This Morning: Add Comments to the Chronicle, Please
Opposition to bayou erosion project grows louder
$6 million Memorial Park project would do more harm than good, opponents say
By Kiah Collier, The Houston Chronicle, May 20, 2014
A $6 million plan to tame a mile-and-a-quarter stretch of Buffalo Bayou is drawing an ever-louder outcry from several prominent environmental and conservation groups who say the project aimed at reducing erosion and improving water quality would only make things worse.
Opposition to the so-called Memorial Park Demonstration Project, targeting a segment of the historic bayou that snakes between Memorial Park’s secluded southern edge and the River Oaks Country Club golf course, has grown more vocal as a deadline to submit feedback to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approaches. The project requires a permit from the Corps.
The agency on Thursday announced it would extend the public comment period by 30 days, until June 30, citing “the complexity of the project studies and stream restoration techniques.”
Borne of a 2010 workshop hosted by the Bayou Preservation Association, the project calls for reshaping the banks of the bayou that wind past the posh country club, the Hogg Bird Sanctuary, a residential neighborhood and the southernmost border of the 1,503-acre park.
The plan calls for the segment of Buffalo Bayou – stressed, both sides agree, by the increased runoff that has come with urban development – to be widened, its course adjusted in some places and its crumbling banks shaped into stable slopes. A mass of vegetation would be stripped away from its banks and trees removed. Replanting would occur toward the end of the project, the cost of which Harris County, the city of Houston and the country club have agreed to share.
…
“If we strip off 80 percent of the vegetation, if we remove the trees that shade the water, we will actually ruin a mile and a quarter of the main channel of Buffalo Bayou,” said Evelyn Merz, conservation chair of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club.
The group is proposing an alternative that involves promoting the existing habitat by planting native vegetation. It would impact the area less “because it will be aimed at the areas that most need support,” Merz said.
….
Anne Olson, president of the Buffalo Bayou Partnership, which oversees the waterway from Shepherd Drive east to the Turning Basin Terminal, said the proposed project will reduce the amount of sediment that ends up on hike-and-bike trails farther east.
“What happens for us downstream is that the silt that sloughs off the banks in Memorial Park ends up down on our trails, and it’s a huge maintenance issue for us, so anything that can be done to alleviate the erosion of those banks is an important thing,” Olson said.
Sign the Petition to the Army Corps of Engineers
May 28, 2014
Here’s an easy, fast way to make a comment to the Army Corps of Engineers before the June 30 deadline.
Buffalo Bayou riparian forest. Photo by Jim Olive.
A friend of Buffalo Bayou named Jamie Campbell has started a MoveOn petition that you can sign.
It’s titled “Stop the Bulldozers on the Wild Banks of Buffalo Bayou in Houston’s Memorial Park.” It will be sent to the Army Corps of Engineers and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality before the June 30 deadline for comments on Harris County’s application for a permit to bulldoze the bayou.
You can sign the petition here. Pass it around. Tell your friends. We can stop this bad idea!