Developer offers to renourish beach if rezoning given OK
Source: Houston Chronicle, by Harvey Rice
November 15, 2007
Company would pay for a project to expand the Galveston shore if deal goes through
GALVESTON — A Chicago company behind the largest development ever proposed for Galveston is offering to help finance a plan to renourish the island's rapidly eroding beaches.
The Marquette Cos. will pay for expanding the $13.5 million beach renourishment project only if the City Council approves a controversial rezoning agreement that is crucial to the company's development plan.
"I think whatever we do is contingent on getting the approval," said Darren Sloniger, managing director of Marquette Land Investments LLC.
The City Council is scheduled to vote in two weeks on an unusual agreement in which it would rezone a large portion of the 1,058-acre development to recreational from single-family housing, the most restrictive zoning category.
In exchange, Marquette will restrict construction to what is outlined in its original plan. Without the agreement, recreational zoning would allow construction usually considered undesirable in a residential area, including taverns.
City Manager Steve LeBlanc said he was unaware of the proposal, until questioned by a reporter, but noted that he had already recommended approval of the rezoning agreement at a previous council meeting.
"Marquette has not approached city officials," LeBlanc said. "Sure it's welcome, but it will have no bearing on my recommendation one way or the other."
Susan Henry, spokeswoman for the Galveston Beach to Bay Preserve, which opposes the massive development, accused Marquette of making the offer in order to win the support of neighborhood associations near the beach and influence the City Council.
Neither Sloniger nor Mark Leffler, spokesman for the Texas General Land Office, would say how much Marquette is proposing to contribute or how much the project would be expanded from its current three miles, running west from the end of the Galveston Seawall.
But Jerry Mohen — president of the West Galveston Island Home Owners Association — said he was told that the project would be extended about a mile to 15 Mile Road.
Land Office Commissioner Jerry Patterson last month announced the proposal to extend Galveston's rapidly eroding beaches by about 200 feet using more than 1 million cubic feet of sand pumped from Big Reef, a sand bar between the south jetty and Inner Bar Channel.
Timothy Dellapenna, a coastal marine biologist at Texas A&M University at Galveston who surveyed Big Reef for the Land Office, said the only drawback to the plan was that it could exhaust the closest and most easily accessible sand reserve for restoring beaches that would be washed away by a major hurricane.
