Project targets golf area for flood basins

Defunct course expected to hold enough water to fill Astrodome

A defunct golf course in northwest Houston will be excavated to hold 350 million gallons of stormwater — more than enough to fill the Astrodome — with City Council’s approval Wednesday of an agreement with the county flood control district.

After Harris County Commissioners Court signs off, local officials will design 10 connected detention basins to transform the former Inwood Forest Golf Course into a key source of flood control in the White Oak Bayou watershed.

The city purchased the 227-acre course in March 2011 for $9.3 million and spent $2.5 million building the first two detention basins. The county now will invest about $20 million to design and develop the remaining basins, with the first phase projected to begin construction next year, said Alan Black, the Harris County Flood Control District’s director of engineering.

“It’s fairly large in the grand scheme of things,” Black said. “To be able to find an opportunity to create 1,000 acre-feet of storage in an area that’s completely built out is amazing.”

The two basins already functioning on the old course, which snakes through neighborhoods on both sides of Antoine between Victory and Gulf Bank, can hold about 56 acre-feet of stormwater. Engineers have estimated the site could hold up to 1,052 acre-feet.

In a twist for floodprone Houston, however, neighborhood leaders say

they would rather forgo some stormwater storage to maintain as much recreational space as possible.

At a minimum, said Julie Grothues of the Inwood Forest Community Improvement Association, neighbors would like the site’s golf cart paths to be redeveloped into hike and bike trails, and tied into the Bayou Greenways trail network that has expanded into their area.

“We don’t know how all this is going to fit together,” she said. “We’re happy to see things are finally moving forward, but what we don’t know is what the detention is going to look like or if they’re going to try to maximize it, which wouldn’t leave much room for recreation.”

Usually built up front

Neighbors do want detention, she said. Though past flood control efforts lowered the flooding risk for many homes in the area, some residents remain vulnerable. Black estimated that 400 homes and businesses no longer would be in the 100-year floodplain — at risk of flooding during a storm with a 1 percent chance of happening in any given year — after the basins are complete.

However, Grothues noted that detention ponds in neighborhoods typically are designed up front as part of a new suburban master-planned community, not retrofitted into established areas.

“We didn’t want to be the guinea pig for, ‘Well, let’s put detention in,’ and then that’s what it is — detention behind your house,” she said.

Striking a balance

Mayor Sylvester Turner, who lives near the old golf course, and Councilwoman Brenda Stardig, who represents the surrounding District A, pledged to strike a balance between flood control and fun.

“There is a way of having detention as well as recreational space that really enhances the area,” Turner said, “and, quite frankly, can be transformative at uplifting that whole Antoine corridor.”

Black said he is sensitive to those concerns and noted his staff is completing a detailed inventory of the site’s trees, a key concern of Stardig.

“We prefer not to take the approach of clearing everything and then building our project,” he said. “We’ve got a plan for community outreach to talk about what we found through these initial studies and what we plan to do to achieve this volume and also meet the needs of the area from a recreational standpoint.”

The city’s purchase of the site helped end a lawsuit residents had filed against a developer who had hoped to build on the course, only to have a jury agree with residents’ claim that the land was restricted to use as a green space.