Harvey recovery a slow, costly process
While the rest of Goose Island State Park remains closed to visitors as it has been since the final days of August, the boat rampin the popular bayside state park near Rockport will reopen to the public this Saturday for the first time in almost three months.
This follows the recent reopening of the boat rampat the Birch Creek Unit of Lake Somerville State Park near Brenham.
The gates of Brazos Bend State Park, one of the most visited of Texas’ 95 or so state park units and a jewel of the parks system, swung open this past week, too, although some parts of the park along the Brazos River in Fort Bend County remain closed to the public.
The same goes for Village Creek State Park near Beaumont, where visitors recently were cleared to use one of the camping areas but are not allowed to hike or mountain-bike the park’s trails, and access to the park’s namesake stream for fishing, swimming, launching kayaks or canoes remains prohibited.
Twelve weeks after Hurricane Harvey slammed into the middle Texas coast, then spent the next week careening around the state’s middle and upper coast dropping record rain sand causing devastation on an unprecedented scale, the damage and costs of the storm to Texas’ state park system, other facilities operated by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the state’s outdoor recreation are slowly but persistently being measured and addressed. Those effects still are very much felt, and they will be for a long time.
Thatwas the gist of briefing sT PW D staff offered earlier this month to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission.
The briefing laid out someof the impacts the storm had on agency properties, staff and the hunters, anglers, boaters, campers, hikers, birders and other outdoor recreation in the state. Hardest hit
While more than 40 T PW D facilities were damaged by the storm, 30 sites — 16 state parks, five wildlife management areas, eight coastal fisheries stations and a TPWD regional office— were hardesthit.
Many of those sites were immediately closed to the public. Most have since reopened, but often with limited use and many with areas from which visitors are restricted.
Three state parks— Goose Island, Mustang Island and Stephen F. Austin — remain closed to public use and could remain so for weeks if not months. Updates on the status of all state parks is available on the agency’s website, tpwd. texas.gov/state-parks/ .
While more than adozen state parks were closed in the wake of Harvey, dozens remained open. And those parks were opened for use by storm evacuees at no cost to the displaced Texans. Texas state parks housed 8,203 evacuees who spent a total of 9,006 nights in the parks, Carter Smith, TPW Dex ecutive director, told the commission. The agency waived $388,606 in park entry and use fees, he said.
Because of damages and unsafe conditions created bythe storm, the agency cancelled 11 scheduled public hunt son five wildlife management areas. That affected 530 hunters who had previously drawn permits for the cancelled hunt sand cost the agency an estimated $17,000 in revenue. Adding up the damage
But that lost revenue from public hunt fees, whichis plowed back into the agency’s wildlife management programs, pales against the tens of millions in other storm-related losses to the agency.
Mike Jensen, director of TPWD’s administrative resources division, told the commission the agency is still assessing damages to parks and other agency sites but preliminary estimates place damage to buildings and other infrastructure at $32million to $48 million. Other losses — lost park revenue, loss of tools, equipment, furniture, etc. — are estimated at $7 million to $9 million.
The agency also has seen a significant lag in revenue generated by sale of hunting and fishing licenses in the wake of the hurricane. That license revenue is crucial to funding the state’s wildlife and fisheries programs.
Hurricane Harvey hit at the start of the annual hunting/fishing license year, whichbegins Sept. 1. Those licenses annually generate about $110 million, with as much as 40-45 percent of those purchases coming in September.
This year, license sales during the first week or so after the storm were down as much as 20 percent from the previous year, Jensen said. License sales recovered somewhat in October and, as of early Novembers, were down “only” about 10 percent.
The as much as $48 million in damage to infrastructure puts “extreme strain” on the agency’s budget, Jensen told the commission. TPWD already faces a backlog of tens of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance to state parks and other agency sites, withmuch of that a result of a series of other natural disasters — wildfires in 2011 and flooding in 2015 and 2016— that damagedmorethan a score of parks and wildlife management areas.
While the Texas Legislature has in its past two sessions increased the amount of park funding by dedicating more of state sales tax revenue generated by sale of sporting goods to the parks ystem, that funding falls far short of what is needed to simply catch up to the parks’ maintenance backlog, muchless fund addressing losses caused by Harvey.
The agency plans to step back and re-prioritize funding aswell as take a hard look at how and what the agency builds in floodprone areas, agency staff said.
TPWD’s law enforcement division also took a huge economic hit from the storm. The agency’s game wardens played a huge role in search and rescue operations and other public safety duties during and following the storm. Atotal of 469 Texas game wardens worked during the storm and its aftermath, deploy- ing in motor vehicles, boats and aircraft. Those wardens, Smith said, effected 12,697 water-based rescues.
Early estimates of direct costs of the that emergency response are $13.5 million to $16.1 million, Smith told the commission. Muchof that cost is eligible to be reimbursed to the state through federal disaster aid programs.
Getting that reimbursement, like addressing and repairing the considerable damage Harvey did to the state’s parks and wildlife management areas, won’t happen overnight. But, as seen with the incremental reopening of parks such as BrazosB endand boat ramps at places such as Goose Island and Lake Somerville, it is happening.
Figuring out howto pay for those repairs and rehabilitation promises to be a longer slog.