The committee should reject this tacky, impractical document and consider directing hundreds of millions of dollars towards the purchase of new parkland instead.<\/p>\n
Among other things, the plan misleadingly describes Buffalo Bayou as it flows along Memorial Park as \u201caltered.\u201d A slide shown at the final presentation<\/a> 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 \u201caltered Buffalo Bayou.\u201d (See slide 18.)<\/p>\n We were stunned. Reasonable people would assume that \u201caltered\u201d 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.<\/p>\n But no, \u201caltered\u201d in this case means \u201cchanged over time,\u201d 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 \u201caltered,\u201d says Arnold in an email.<\/p>\n The conservancy is developing the ten-twenty-thirty-year plan with the Houston Parks and Recreation Department and the Uptown TIRZ 16<\/a>, which is funneling our tax money into the blinged-out project. It\u2019s not clear who is in charge of the master plan, or even who is now in charge of Memorial Park, for that matter.<\/p>\n
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