David Crossley

Katy Prairie to be developed

President, Houston Tomorrow, Mar 16, 09.

Tagged with transportation, urban planning, grand parkway, sprawl

Shortly after the Texas Department of Transportation’s (TxDOT) John Barton characterized the Grand Parkway as “an opportunity to open up areas for development,” the Texas Transportation Commission agreed to give TxDOT the money to start building Segment E of the Grand Parkway straight through the heart of the once-vast Katy Prairie. The vote was unanimous.

Then, after the senior executive of General Growth’s 11,400-acre Bridgeland project, the prime beneficiary of the road, told Harris County Commissioners Court, “We need this road to continue the build-out of Bridgeland,” the Commissioners voted to give out about $10 million for engineering work on the road. The vote was unanimous.

A couple of weeks ago, the Houston-Galveston Area Council’s Transportation Policy Council voted to send the request to the Transportation Commission for $181 million, to come from the “stimulus” funds in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The vote was unanimous.

On Monday, March 9, The Sierra Club sued the Federal Highway Administration over the project, claiming that the agency failed to adequately assess the project’s environmental impacts.

That same day, the Washington Post ran a front-page story about whether some of the stimulus projects violate the letter or the spirit of the legislation, citing the Grand Parkway as one of its examples.

On March 12, Vice President Joe Biden told the White House Recovery and Reinvestment Act Implementation Conference “six months from now, if the verdict on this effort is that we’ve wasted the money, we built things that were unnecessary, or we’ve done things that are legal but make no sense, then, folks, don’t look for any help from the federal government for a long while.”

Shortly after Biden spoke, President Obama walked into the room and said, among other things, “If we see money being misspent, we’re going to put a stop to it, and we will call it out and we will publicize it.”
On Friday, March 13, a Houston Chronicle editorial asked (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/6308590.html)“should federal stimulus dollars be spent on a portion of the Grand Parkway that is scheduled to operate as a toll road? We say no. Emphatically.”

Later that day, US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood was in Houston, and at a Greater Houston Partnership luncheon he said “We want to have sustainability. We want to creae opportunities for livable communities where people can get out of their cars.” Later in the day, he told a group at the Palm Center, in answer to a question about the Parkway and other toll road projects, “We’re going to be watching, I promise you.”

Two Democratic Harris County Commissioners, El Franco Lee and Sylvia Garcia, voted several times for the sprawl-inducing project shortly after the leader of their party, President Obama, said “The days where we just build sprawl forever, those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats, everybody recognizes that that’s not a smart way to build communities.”

Two Houston City Council members who sit on the Transportation Policy Council at H-GAC joined in the unanimous vote asking the Transportation Commission for money to begin building Segment E, even though the Parkway would shift economic development away from the City of Houston, and destroy the greenspace that Houston’s citizens want so badly to preserve for their children.

One member of the Harris County Congressional delegation opposed the stimulus funds for the Parkway in private conversation with me, but has not spoken out publicly yet.

So far as I know, the only regional elected official who has publicly renounced the project is Fort Bend County Commissioner Richard Morrison, who wrote in a Chronicle op-ed piece “From a mobility standpoint, many of these remaining segments are useless. Miles and miles of the remaining pieces will cross open prairie where no one lives, will have little or no effect on traffic and are not needed. When our transportation dollars from Washington are desperately needed to get people to and from our population centers, it only seems reasonable that the federal stimulus money should be spent on mobility projects that are actually needed.”

Harris County residents, responding to the annual Houston Area Survey conducted by Rice Sociology professor Stephen Klineberg, overwhelmingly support Morrison’s point of view. Asked where future growth should take place, 76% say “Redevelop older areas to build where services, streets, and sewer lines exist. Only 15% say to “Continue to build new suburbs on the edge of existing suburbs.” Further, 55% believe that taxpayer money should be used to improve rail and buses, while only 37% want to spend tax revenue to expand existing highways.

In H-GAC’s Envision Houston Region citizen visioning process, the top priority of citizens was preserving greenspace. Yet all the elected officials in this process voted to destroy 80,000-90,000 acres of incredibly sensitive, useful natural services-providing greenspace.

According to the Houston-Galveston Area Council’s forecasts, essentially all of the greenspace in Harris County will be developed by 2035 except for the Addicks reservoirs, the current parks, and greenspace that is being recovered along some of the bayous. Now we know why.

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