"Green Is Good, Baby"

Other than playing an occasional round of Putt-Putt, I have never been interested in golf, but shortly after Hurricane Ike hit Houston in 2008, my wife Susan and I began spending time on an abandoned course, the old Clear Lake City Golf Club. which is a few miles from our home.  The course opened in 1963 and closed in 2001; from 2005 to 2011, it was tied up in litigation, as competing interests vied for ownership.  The company that bought the property in 2001, Renaissance Golf Group, planned to resell it for commercial development, but local citizens and the Clear Lake City Water Authority (CLCWA) were working to preserve the space as a park and (once the CLCWA came on board) a water detention facility, something the flood-prone Bayou City badly needed.

Which brings me back to Ike.  In the aftermath of the storm, Susan and I took up bicycling as a reliable way to run errands (since gasoline was not readily available for several days), and we began riding on the old golf cart trails as an alternate route to the grocery store.  Long after the hurricane and its aftermath, however, we continued riding bikes for pleasure and following legal developments surrounding the fate of the course.  More about that litigation later, but first, let me describe the 200-acre space.

The photo above shows how the course looked when we began riding on it in 2008.  The cart trails were showing signs of neglect, but they still provided a stable riding surface. Tee markers, ball washers, trash cans, and (non-functioning) restroom facilities were still visible along the fairways.  (Once final ownership was established, all of those features would eventually be removed.)

And, of course, there was the clubhouse.  The building had been boarded up for seven years and vandals had nearly destroyed it, and in April 2011 it burned to the ground.  The photo below shows what the clubhouse looked like three years earlier.

Even in its undeveloped state, the green space attracted hundreds of people to its ponds and dense woods, unexpected discoveries in a city of more than two million people.  

And then there was the wildlife.  The park provided habitat for egrets, herons, hawks, woodpeckers, and turtles.

Some people spotted alligators in the old water features.  The space was beautiful year-round, rich with crimson and yellow leaves in the fall.  But looks can be deceptive. While Chinese tallow trees (like the one pictured below) produce vibrant fall foliage, they are an invasive species that needs to be eradicated.

The park was even more alive in the spring as bees and wildflowers took over.  The sand traps were overgrown, and when the fairways were not mowed for a month or more, they exploded into robust urban meadows.

Of course, things couldn't stay this way.  In addition to the owners of the property, who were growing impatient to sell the land, the CLCWA was pushing to acquire it—initially through purchase and, failing that, through condemnation proceedings—and area citizens were trying to save their beloved green space.  None were more active or vocal than the homeowners along the fairways.  Signs proclaiming "Keep Green Space Green" began sprouting up in front lawns, and one industrious homeowner put up a giant banner that declared, "Green is Good ... Baby!" 

Indeed it is, but what exactly to do with the old golf course remained unsettled.  Some citizens wanted to keep the space as it was, to let it thrive as a mostly undeveloped park, while others desired more active civic involvement and investment, as was eventually provided by the CLCWA.

After failing in a bid to purchase the property outright and later losing its case to acquire the land by condemnation, the water authority won its suit in appeal in May 2011.  Shortly thereafter, the CLCWA authority took over maintenance of the green space and began investigating options for development.

One controversial move involved clearing trees around the ponds.  While dozens of citizens volunteered to thin trees and brush along the banks, some property owners asserted that indiscriminate clearing would actually make the ground more susceptible to flooding since the natural growth, particularly the tall willows, absorbed much of the run-off.  As it turns out, hydrologists and landscape architects have devised long-range plans that will create a much better detention system for run-off water than the current water features can hold.

External factors soon impacted trees in the park, none more than the severe drought that plagued the Gulf coast in 2011 and 2012.  Beautiful oaks and pines began dying at an unprecedented rate.

As a result, the CLCWA contracted to cut and remove more than one hundred trees, like this twenty-foot-tall magnolia.

As competing visions for what to do with the green space continued, the CLCWA pushed ahead with plans to develop a water detention facility, and in early 2013, a landscape architecture firm, SWA Group, unveiled its master plan during a community meeting.  The first phase of the plan has already been implemented, and the fifty-year-old golf course is now being transformed into a space that provides hike-and-bike trails, natural wetlands, and a major detention facility capable of diverting flood waters.  When the park—tentatively called Exploration Green—and detention facility are completed over the next twelve to fifteen years, the original waterways that run through the park and feed into Horespen Bayou will be cut much deeper than the one pictured below.  These new waterways will require additional tree removal, but the tree canopy on the outer banks will be preserved and expanded, and native grasses and wildflowers will be introduced to create a habitat requiring less maintenance than the fairway turf.

While the CLCWA plan has its detractors, most notably a group calling itself Save the Old Golf Course, most Clear Lake citizens support the work of the water authority and are pleased that its efforts will preserve and enhance 200 acres of green space in the Clear Lake City area.  In these times of increasing urban sprawl, any victory for natural habitat is a major accomplishment.