Wealthy Houstonian driven to cleaning up Buffalo Bayou
Mike Garver is not one to seek the limelight, but when Houstonians jog or ride their bikes on the trails along Buffalo Bayou, or promenade under the leafy shade of the trees in Sesquicentennial Park, or take a lazy float down the bayou in their canoes and experience a little nature in the heart of the city, they might want to say a quiet thank you to him.
He’s not asking for it,
“I wasn’t born an environmentalist. In fact I never gave it a moment’s thought until I started working on the bayou ...” Mike Garver, known as the Trashman of Buffalo Bayou
and he wouldn’t dream of taking credit. But for the better part of the last three decades, Garver, a Houston Realtor and construction firm owner, has played an integral role in turning a nine- mile stretch of Buffalo Bayou from Shepherd Drive to the Ship Channel turning basin into one of the true jewels of the city, a green space that last month was named one of the Top 10 Great Public Spaces in America.
A longtime member of the Buffalo Bayou Partnership, and one of
its chairmen emeritus, Garver is 75 years old, successful and wealthy, and would be forgiven if he chose to park himself on a bench on the banks of the bayou and enjoy the evident fruits of his labor. But he isn’t done yet, and he won’t be until the view from the bench isn’t marred by the river of plastic bottles, aluminum cans and other trash floating by in the current.
His efforts to clean up the waterway started about a dozen years ago with him and some helpers literally scooping up the trash with crab nets from a johnboat; now specialized vacuumboats do the job. But still it comes, flushed into the bayou every time it rains. The Sisyphean task of collecting the trash isn’t solving the problem.
So next year, for the second time, Garver, known fondly as the Trashman of Buffalo Bayou, will put on his cape and head to Austin to again fight for a statewide refundable bottle bill that would pay people to turn in and recycle beverage containers.
Moved here in 1964
By his own admission, Garver is an unlikely environmental crusader. He’s an engineer who specializes in civil construction projects. He enjoys hunting. He’s a conservative Republican, even if his wife thinks he’s actually a closet Democrat. He owns property on Buffalo Bayou east of downtown, and readily concedes that his interest in developing and beautifying the waterway, initially at least, was commercial.
“I wasn’t born an environmentalist,” he says. “In fact I never gave it a moment’s thought until I started working on the bayou and then all sorts of things start to show up, and not only the litter, which ismy real pet project. But I guess I would callmyself an environmentalist now.”
He was born in Lexington, Ky., during the Great Depression and raised in an itinerant family that lived in 17 different houses by the time he had finished high school. His father was an inventor who came up with the idea of the coin- operated locker while working for the Greyhound bus company, an invention that enabled him to attend the University of Kentucky and graduate with a degree in engineering.
Garver and his new wife, Susan, came to Texas in 1964 expecting to find “JohnWayne and the badlands,” but instead found mosquitoes, swamps andmuddy bayous. When the company he was with wanted to move himback toWest Virginia, he and Susan decided to settle here.
Tunneled to success
He started a construction company, now called BRH Garver, and went into business. In themid1980s he won a $ 13 million bid to lay a newsewer line through River Oaks, the richest contract to that point for his company and one that included a problematic new stipulation: the pipe had to be laid in a tunnel, not a trench, as was usual practice.
Overseas, where the practice of laying pipe in tunnels was well- established, contractors used a tool called a laser- guided micro tunneler to do the job. They were not used in the United States. Undaunted, Garver bought twomachines, taught himself how to operate them in Houston’s gumbo soil, successfully completed the job and introduced the technology in this country.
“We’d had several, smaller make- or- break jobs before it,” he says. “But that River Oaks job was really make- orbreak.”
Buffalo Bayou Partnership was formed in 1986, with themission of reviving long- dormant plans for developing the bayou parkway. Around the same time Garver, whose construction yard was on the east side of town, was helping start up what is now the East End Chamber of Commerce.
Unwanted notice
He became the East End’s representative at the partnership, recruited Anne Olson, its current president, and began learning about bayous.
“He’s a contractor by profession, but I think we’ve been able to convert him,” Olson says with a laugh. “You know, instead of pouring concrete, plant trees or whatever. He’s a self- made man and you wouldn’t know he has a lot of money, and … when he gives it, he likes to give it without making a big deal about it.”
Garver has served two terms as chairman of the partnership and is currently on the board, but essentially he has been involved with and contributed to the organization from its inception. But he has done so quietly.
“He will do anything it takes to further the work that he thinks is important in terms of time, money and plain old hands- on labor,” says Bob Phillips, a Houston banker and the partnership’s current board chairman. “It’s virtually impossible to say thank you to him and it’s virtually impossible for him to allow himself to be recognized, and I admire that in him.”
Garver did get some uninvited and unwanted notice in 2002, however, when questions were raised about the partnership’s elaborate master plan for Buffalo Bayou, including for industrialized sections east of downtown where Garver owns some bank- side property. Beautification of the bayou by the partnership, with which Garver was associated, could increase the value of land he owns.
Development on the eastern stretch so far is largely confined to hikeandbike trails on easements along the banks. Garver acknowledges this has “worked out in my favor,” particularly on one piece of property on Clinton Drive at Jensen. But hemaintains that easements for some sections of the trails might not have been secured if he had not bought the properties, and the partnership certainly did not have the money to do so.
“If we hadn’t have moved in there and bought the properties we did buy, something would have gotten built that might well have precluded the trail,” he says. “I bought those properties in the first place to secure the easement, and in both cases I donated the easement. Not everybody in the world wants people walking in their back yard.”
Putting up own funds
Besides closing gaps in the planned hikeandbike trails along the bayou, for which he has pledged $ 2 million of his ownmoney, Garver’s focus for some years has been the trash in the bayou, which inevitably ends up in Galveston Bay. His efforts started small, but have since grown into a $ 400,000- a- year program for the partnership.
“Mike’s been a champion for bayou issues in the city for a long time on different levels with his work at the Buffalo Bayou Partnership,” says Bob Stokes, president of the Galveston Bay Foundation, “but certainly more recently on the bottle bill and generating the discussion that needs to be had about how we clean up this mess that we have.”
But collecting 2,300 cubic yards of trash a year is not a cure for the problem. So, armed with the fact that 10 states have so- called bottle bills, and a survey showing that 65 percent of Texans would support it here, Garver found sponsors in state Sen. Rodney Ellis and Rep. Garnet Coleman ( both Democrats who represent Houston) and attempted to get one passed during last year’s legislative session.
It failed. But that’s not the language Garver would use, and it’s not stopping him from trying again next year.
“I like to say we’re making progress,” he says. “It’s a partisan issue. The lobbyists for the drink industry have branded this thing as a tax and I say, ‘ Well what part of a refund don’t you understand?’ Senator Ellis has advised me that we really need a Republican to be the leader, so I’ve been talking to Senator TommyWilliams and others. We’ve talked to them and they all see the point, but none of them have said yet they will carry the ball.”
A bipartisan bayou
To Garver, ridding the area’s bayous of the scourge of plastic bottles, beer cans and other trash— and after years of studying it he says he can guarantee that Budweiser and Ozarka are the bestselling beverages in Harris County— should not be a partisan issue.
And yet it is, and some have advised him his bill likely won’t pass the next time round, that he should quit and sit on that bench on the bayou.
“There are days when that seems like a heck of a good idea,” he says. And then he points to a large picture of plastic bottles, Styrofoam, beer cans and other detritus clogging the bayou.
“But that’s what’s drivingme. Right there.”