The Galveston County Daily News

GALVESTON — Painters on Wednesday were covering the trim of Eddie Janek’s Channelview house with a fresh coat of dark blue paint.

Although Hurricane Ike inundated the bottom floor of the two-story structure, Janek is quickly making repairs.

But other homeowners are not so anxious to rebuild. Several heavily damaged houses have “for sale” signs in their front yards.

And one homeowner has asked the city to consider buying her house as part of its bay-front buyout program.

City council members who want to establish parks with bay access eagerly authorized Deputy City Manager Brandon Wade to submit a buyout application to the state’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program for the house at 8008 Channelview.

But Janek and other neighbors are less than enthusiastic about having a public park next door.

“We have a hard time with traffic here anyway, and our street’s not real wide,” Janek said. “To talk about having a public park here with a boat ramp is ridiculous.”

The lot might be big enough for a few picnic tables once the house is demolished, but people coming to the park would have to leave their cars on the street.

Packing the street with cars would be dangerous, and some of the neighborhood’s families do have small children, Janek said.

The city should not be planning to put a park right in the middle of a neighborhood trying to recover from some of Ike’s worst damage, he said.

Residents in other bay-front neighborhoods have similar complaints, Wade said.

But despite opposition, Wade’s staff is continuing to contact potential sellers in areas where the 2007 Greenprint survey conducted by the Trust for Public Land showed island residents wanted more public parks.

Although the city has a plan to provide public access to the island’s beaches, residents and visitors have few places to fish or launch a kayak into the bay.

And for people with substantially damaged houses, the buyout could be their best chance of walking away from a mortgage on a house that can’t be repaired without being raised above the base flood elevation, about 11 feet in most areas.

Not Much Interest Yet

The hazard mitigation program gives communities money to buy, move or raise damaged properties to prevent future flooding. Houses the city buys must be demolished and the land remains open space forever.

Although a majority of the substantially damaged property in the city is in neighborhoods behind the seawall, the city council does not want to use grant money to buy them out because that would take a large chunk of property off the tax rolls.

Bay-front properties, where the city would like more parkland, are the only houses behind the seawall the council is willing to buy with hazard mitigation funds.

But none of the property owners contacted so far have shown interest in selling, Wade said.

Losing Residents

And city officials last week learned that the house at 8008 Channelview is not substantially damaged and might not qualify for the grant program, Wade said Wednesday.

Although Janek and his neighbors might not have anything to worry about, the former county commissioner has called several council members to complain about the buyout program.

If the council continues to disregard residents’ concerns, more people will leave the island, Janek said.

“We’re losing a lot of residents already,” he said. “We can’t afford to lose any more by some move that is really ridiculous.”