Golf Course Residents Teed Off!:
Homeowners Refuse to Back Down
(Houston, Texas) – To hear the owner of Clear Lake Golf Club tell it, it’s a done deal, but developing the golf course may end up being harder to do than getting on the green from the middle of a sand trap.
That Mark Voltmann, President of Renaissance Golf Group, LLC, and owner of the course, is looking for a buyer for the property is not surprising, since he readily admits being unable to manage the golf course successfully, and has only limited experience running golf courses to start with. (His group owns two courses, Quail Valley in Friendswood, which he is developing parcel by parcel, much to the chagrin of homeowners there, and the Clear Lake club). Voltmann’s buyer of choice is a developer, however, and not a golf operator, a choice he plans to try to force into play by grossly overpricing the rehabilitation cost of the neglected property. He is so adamant about selling the golf course land for development, as he stated recently in local press conferences, that he would be willing to take a ”big discount off of what the value of it would be without deed restrictions” and let the developer “sit on it for 16 years.”
The biggest problem with Voltmann’s plan is that he didn’t really do his research about the property as developable space and look into the water control issues, even though he told Addie Wiseman he had. (He apparently doesn’t have to consider flooding with his real estate investments in his hometown of Dublin, Ohio). Who would have thought that a little ol’ public golf course would serve as a retention/detention pond in the heart of little ol’ Clear Lake City?? And he’s working with a marketing guy who actually thinks that our older homes would benefit from development because property values would go up, and he uses the older homes in Bellaire as an example. Funny, residents in Bellaire are telling Channel 11 that construction of new homes is leading to flooding in the older homes because the water runoff has nowhere to go. Even the mayor is in on it. “It’s become the old homeowner’s problem,” said Bellaire City Mayor Cindy Siegal.
“The flooding problem is not going to simply go away, and it is getting worse as more land is covered with impermeable surfaces,” Hana Ginzbarg of the Harris County Flood Control District told workshop attendees at a meeting in February. And Clear Lake resident Merle Bunde is certainly one to know. Mr. Bunde bought his home on the golf course in 1965 and has monitored the water flow during normal rains as well as tropical storms over the last 40 years. The Clear Lake City Water Authority added two storm drains near Mr. Bunde’s home after flooding occurred in ’79, ’89 and ’95 on Reseda at Tory Pines. And the bulk of the drainage goes from the street under the golf course parking lot into the ditch on the golf course behind Mr. Bunde’s home. Mr. Bunde estimates that a definite flood is about 4” per hour and with current drainage, that level of rainfall creates a lake on the course behind him. He monitored Chantal (’89) , Allison (‘01) and an unnamed but huge rain event on Memorial Day in ‘95, all of which flooded his home from a half a foot to a foot above the door jam. After looking seriously at the effects of concrete in a proposed development on the course behind his home, effectively eliminating the detention that now happens, Mr. Bunde estimates that a storm dropping even less than 4” an hour would flood his house and fill the drains to capacity. This scenario would be played out in all of Clear Lake City, effecting capacity of Horsepen Bayou and all communities connected to that watershed. The ditch on the golf course is where the Water Authority has run the storm drains near Mr. Bunde’s home. The golf course is obviously and purposely used as a retention/detention pond for the Clear Lake City Community. A developer is going to have quite a headache trying to reroute the history of 40 years of quantified, identified water flow in Clear Lake City to another location to develop a natural retention/detention area within our community. So finding a developer who wants to take this project on may be hard to do.
And Mr. Voltmann has one more problem that he didn’t count on having, the homeowners of this sleepy little community are opposed to development of the green space behind their homes. And they are not being quiet. And they are not rolling over. So where does this leave Mr. Voltmann in Clear Lake City? I’d say up a creek without a paddle.
For more information contact:
Nina Johnston
Clear Lake City Green Space Preservation Committee
Press Officer
281-480-0791
Website: www.clccl.org