Sugar Land, League City projects show suburbs’ passion for parks
LEAGUE CITY — Playground: check. Majestic live oak trees: check. Picnic tables: check.
Gazebo, basketball court, old railroad car: check, check, check.
League Park, in the historic heart of this fast-growing Galveston County town, has lots to recommend it. What it didn’t have, when I visited on Sunday morning, was people. No kids squealed as they descended the slide. No teenagers shot hoops. No families ate at the picnic tables. Perhaps I stopped by at an inopportune time. In any event, city officials hope the improvements they’re planning will draw enough visitors to make League Park a “destination and entertainment area,” as a description on the city website puts it.
League City residents will have an opportunity to discuss features they’d like to see in the park during a public event with city officials and designers Wednesday evening. New amenities could include a farmers market, a splash pad and a trail connection.
The city of more than 100,000 residents isn’t the only suburban community embracing “soft assets” like parks and trails as essential to their success as nuts-and-blots services like streets and law enforcement.
In Sugar Land, the City Council recently awarded a design contract for a new lake at Brazos River Park, a response to residents who said they wanted
more opportunities for canoeing and kayaking. The city is developing 128 acres of newly acquired parkland along the Brazos River with features including the lake, a festival site and a connecting network of hike-and-bike trails and bridges.
“Years of input showed that citizens felt that projects like that were important,” said Joe Chesser, Sugar Land’s parks and recreation director.
These projects follow the recent makeovers of Levy Park and Emancipation Park in Houston, the latest in a flurry of major initiatives that started with Discovery Green in 2008 and Buffalo Bayou Park in 2015.
In a column last year, I noted that the surge of investment in “signature” parks — public spaces with lots of amenities and programming — was benefiting Houston more than the communities on its fringe.
This dynamic makes a kind of sense. The suburbs, after all, are havens for people who have fled crowded cities to live in big houses on big lots with big yards — private parks, of a sort.
“Historically, suburbs are seen as a verdant escape,” said Kyle Shelton, a fellow at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, who wrote a report last year exploring strategies for success in the area’s suburbs. “The large yards were seen as your private domain.”
Increasingly, though, suburban leaders have come to see the value of public spaces teeming with people and activity.
The projects in League City and Sugar Land are modest in comparison to Houston’s recent parks extravaganzas. But in the context of the size of the cities undertaking them, they are ambitious.
Sugar Land’s projects are funded with $31.5 million in bonds approved by voters in 2013; that’s about one quarter of the $122 million cost of Discovery Green, most of which was funded by private donors.
The lake at Brazos River Park will cover 25 to 30 acres, said Chesser, the city parks director. The adjacent festival site and additional parkland along the river opened earlier this year.
Prior to the 2013 bond election, Sugar Land officials obtained extensive public input through a 100-member bond committee, city spokesman Doug Adolph said. Voters authorized an increase in the property tax rate of up to 3.1 cents to fund the projects; revenue from less than a penny of the increase has been used to date, Adolph said.
Suburban leaders, take heed: When voters agree to a potential tax increase, you can be sure they really want the vibrant public spaces their hard-earned dollars will support.