McAllen's push for green space tempered by financial realties

 McALLEN - The plan spread out on the meeting room table takes a small, four-decade-old park honoring the city's firefighters and turns it into an outdoorsman's paradise in the middle of the city.

Rip out the overgrown brush and make campsites; fill the dried resaca with water and then stock it with game fish like perch and bass - all in a location tucked away near the intersection of Second Street and Business 83.

"It's hard to find places to camp here, where you're not driving all the way out to a state park," said McAllen Parks Director Larry Pressler. "We're hoping someone will buy the old water treatment plant and turn it into a restaurant. It would have a great view over the lake."

The $1 million project is still awaiting grant approval from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, but it's emblematic of a push in McAllen City Hall to both increase green space and create new sorts of parks - outdoor oases that offer more than the standard playground and barbecue pits.

But there are questions reverberating around the parks department about how the city will pay for it all.

Under the city's development code, residential developers must provide 1 acre of park space for every 62 housing units, or pay a parks fee of $700 for every home on the property.

But the estimated cost to the city parks system for each new residence, based on a complex formula factoring in land values and park usage, is about $1,800, Pressler said.

"I'm a bureaucrat. I'm not going to say the fees need to go up," he said.

"But if new subdivisions keep coming in, and we're going to provide them with parks, fees need to go up."

As the McAllen area continues on a more than decade-long period of unprecedented growth, a race is under way to build enough parks for all the new residents of the city.

But passing the burden on to developers, either through land handovers or fees in keeping with parks costs, has met with general resistance from City Hall.

The City Commission voted to increase fees from $300 to $700 per residence a couple of years ago, based on the recommendations of a committee comprised of both developers and park space advocates. But those recommendations, while an improvement, were tempered by political realities, said Danny Gurwitz, a lawyer and chairman of the McAllen Parks and Recreation Board.

"We couldn't go from what it was to the number we needed. It was too much," he said. "To go from $300 to $3,500, you may just get the door slammed in your face and not get anything."

In comparison to the rest of the state, McAllen's parks fees are relatively high, said John Crompton, a parks and recreation professor at Texas A&M University.

"Dallas doesn't even charge a parks fee," he said.

But McAllen's draw over other Rio Grande Valley cities is based in many ways on amenities like neighborhood parks - or better yet, a sought-after spot along the Second Street hike-and-bike trail, said real estate developer Tony Domit.

"Everyone wants to live there," he said. "McAllen is more expensive, but there's a reason people buy here."