Hupp, who was speaking to the Briar Forest Super Neighborhood council on Jan. 20, is the water quality director for the BPA, which was founded in the 1960s to protect the natural banks of Buffalo Bayou from the bulldozers of the Harris County Flood Control District<\/a>. Hupp lamented that a representative of Flood Control wasn\u2019t there to help him make his case for bulldozing and dredging some 80 percent of a healthy stretch of our wild, southern bayou for more than a mile in and around our public Memorial Park, including the great cliffs of the Hogg Bird Sanctuary. This $6 million boondoggle, touted as \u201cbank restoration and stabilization,\u201d is called the Memorial Park Demonstration Project (MPDP). Demonstrating exactly the wrong thing to do for erosion control by razing the riparian buffer, the project will destroy the bayou\u2019s ecosystem. According to the BPA, the bayou will be re-engineered to \u201ca more natural state.\u201d<\/p>\n Briar Forest, which is south of Buffalo Bayou between Gessner, Westheimer, and Dairy Ashford, has been fighting its own battle<\/a> with Flood Control over a plan to destroy a significant amount of forest to create stormwater detention basins.<\/p>\n City Council Member Oliver Pennington<\/a> was at the meeting. Pennington, who is running for mayor<\/a>, represents District G, which includes Briar Forest way out there and much closer into town, the south bank of Buffalo Bayou in the \u201cbank restoration\u201d project area. The south bank, which is half of the project, is owned entirely by the River Oaks Country Club, founded in 1924, of which Pennington is a member and which is donating $2 million or one-third of the projected cost of the \u201cstabilization\u201d project. The club is in the process of digging up and rebuilding its golf course, which over the decades has encroached on what was once thick riparian forest<\/a>, moving closer and closer to the edges of the high banks of the bayou.<\/p>\n
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