Pavilions, walkways planned for Kemah park
Project, expected to take a decade, moving forward; former dump site would remain a nature area
KEMAH — Progress is being made on a project that will bring long-awaited improvements to a nature park in Kemah.
Widely known as 57 Acre Park, the nature area to the south of the Kemah Oaks subdivision at 1894 Park Oaks Drive is on the site of a former dredge spoils dump.
“It won’t have a traditional football field or baseball field, but it will have a big open space,” said Isaac Saldaña, president of the Kemah Community Development Corp. “If we do it all, it will have pavilions, and outlooks and tiers, walkways, an outdoor theater area and all kinds of other stuff.”
Saldaña, who is also a Kemah City Council member, has been involved in the effort to create the park for years.
“I was first involved with the KCDC in 2009, and we were talking about it back then,” he said. “When I got back on KCDC for my second stint, I picked it back up because it had been sitting dormant for a long time. Now we have big plans for it.”
The park will still be treated as a nature facility.
Saldaña said the community development corporation will fund the project.
“We have been budgeting about $400,000 to $500,000 per year to the project,” he said. “The KCDC has been very diligent about saving money for big projects like this. So we have funds to start.”
If all the improvements are made, the project could take 10 years to finish, according to the development corporation.
Starting in 1986, Galveston and Harris counties partnered on a dredging project to mitigate flooding along Clear Creek where silt was piped from Clear Lake to the spoils site to improve water flow. When the project wrapped up in the mid-1990s, Galveston County assumed control of the area with the intention of building a park, which never came to fruition.
Eventually, the city of Kemah took over the nature facility in an agreement in which the county still owned the property but the city maintained it.
Kemah also hoped to build a park, but that project languished.
Little has been done to develop the park over the years. A 15foot-high berm made out of the dredge spoils looms over a small parking lot. The berm is topped with a trail made of shell and is roughly 1 mile square. The interior of the berm is filled with trees, wildflowers and a small pond. Two more trails extend into the thicket.
But there’s more than meets the eye.
“My house actually backs up to the nature facility,” Saldaña said. “We first started appreciating (the park) in 2008 when Hurricane Ike came and knocked our fence down.
“My daughter was 8 or 9 years old at the time, and her window faced the nature facility. She asked if we could not put the fence back up and I said we had to. She said, ‘Well, in the morning and evening these big giant deer walk by.’ I went to her window one morning and this giant buck walked by.” That’s not all. “There’s a family of bobcats out there and I saw it with my own eyes,” Saldaña said. “There’s also hogs out there, coyotes and birds.”
Construction would be in phases, with each one taking about a year to complete, according to city plans. Some of those phases are:
• Developing electrical, water, sewer and drainage infrastructure.
• Removing dirt, underbrush and some trees.
• Building another parking lot.
• Installing lights and water fountains.
• Building pavilions and bathrooms.
• Dredging the pond.
• Adding docks and outlooks.
• Constructing an outdoor learning center.