Send in the Sandhills

I haven't lived in Centerpointe long enough to know whether the unusual concentration of large birds in this area is "normal", or is partially a result of the drought forcing many species including avian predators into suburban areas to search for food, as some recent news articles have suggested.  

What I DO know is that the number and diversity of birds is remarkable.  Part of this is certainly due to the relatively large amount of undeveloped green space in our area:

Nearby open fields marked with arrows.  It may not look like much on a map, but relative to other Clear Lake areas, it's a lot of open land in a relative sense.

Drive south on West Walker on any morning and you are absolutely guaranteed to see at least two towering raptors (birds of prey) perched on light posts between here and Victory Lakes.  This morning, there were three. 

About two days ago, I saw something I've never seen before: I'm about 75% sure I saw a bald eagle flying over Clear Creek at IH-45.  It was simply too large to be any other bird of prey.

And this morning again, another new sighting: a Sandhill Crane in one of the fields on the east side of West Walker just north of Victory Lakes Intermediate School.  Sandhills winter in Texas and are not uncommon, but this is the first time I've ever seen one in a suburban neighborhood.

From http://www.wikipedia.org/, which is no longer blacked out today because of the SOPA/PIPA controversy.
Sandhills are simultaneously well-camoflaged by their muddy greyish color, but hard to miss because of their four-foot-tall stance.

 Anyway, the moral of this short story is that the Cooper's Hawk I recently spotted on my own backyard fence was no fluke.  Look around as you're driving the area, and you might be amazed at what you see in the way of wildlife. 

Construction mystery solved

It's hard to miss all the dirt hitting the fan at the corner of West Walker Street and State Highway 96 (League City Parkway).

Clues as to my eventual identity:
(1) I'm on an arterial intersection.
(2) Nobody digs up that much dirt unless they have something really really big to bury.

As soon as I saw those dirt piles grow (and they got even bigger than what's shown in this pic), I knew it was likely to be a gasoline retail station: all that earthmoving is so that they can bury multiple storage tanks which are usually at least 10,000 gallons apiece.  For a short time, I held out a faint hope that it was yet another of my beloved Buc-ees stores, perhaps a twin to the one we are ever-so-fortunate to have at SH96 and Louisiana (when I moved to Galveston County to be with my husband, he consoled me for my Harris County losses by reminding me, "At least you'll be living closer to a Buc-ees now..."). 

Alas, some internet sleuthing revealed a potentially less exciting prospect:

Excerpted from
http://www.ultimateclearlake.com/stories/265150-business-new-business-licenses-issued-in-clear-lake

How the heck did I track that down??  Well, if you look at the dirt piles carefully, you can see planted beside them some crude spray-painted signs with the number "1114" facing both West Walker and SH 96.  Tradesmen erect those things so that all the subcontractors can efficiently route supplies to the correct construction sites.  Words are not expedient; all they typically use is numbers.  And there is no "1114 West Walker" so therefore the handpainted signs had to refer to a League City Parkway address. 

It amazes me the sheer volume of STUFF that gets posted to, and then left on, the internet for no obvious reason.  If you'd like to know more about the technical aspects of this patch of real estate, you can peruse this document, for instance:

Excerpted from this very lengthy URL:
http://bid.suntech-inc.com/files/01%20-%20PROJECTS%20BIDDING/02%20-%20RECENTLY%20BID%20PROJECTS%20AWAITING%20RESULTS/Shell%20Food%20Mart%20-%20League%20City,%20TX/Geotechnical%20Report.pdf

This is the reported general configuration of what the station will look like when built, according to that report:

Big one - ten pumps, apparently. 
But I bet they won't have breakfast tacos like Buc-ees.

As platted above, the station doesn't appear to consume the entire tract of land that borders Harvard Pointe to the south.  The CAD map currently shows that tract as undivided:

Excerpted from:
http://www.galvestoncad.org/PA/pdf/142-D.pdf

So with the publicly-available information I can find as of today, it's not clear what else will be built on that tract of land along with the gas station, or even if the development of the northern portion is planned yet.  That's an important question for at least six or eight Harvard Pointe families, who I'm sure will want their quality of life maintained (e.g., no bright lights over their fences, that sort of thing). 

If any of you, especially you potentially affected homeowners on Harvard Pointe, have received public relations overtures from the developers of this tract, please drop me a line - I'm just curious as to whether any more details are available.   Thanks.

And oh - if anyone would like more information about The Little Lake Jackson Corporation That Could, Did, and Will Continue To Do So, it's best to start at the top, so I recommend Houston Chronicle's road trip article about the Luling store (and you haven't lived until you've stopped at that place).  There's also "I Was a Buc-ees Virgin" by well-known Houston food critic Alison Cook, but at least as of that article, she had failed to succumb to the spell.  And oh,  - the Buc-ees in Pearland has its own Facebook page.  I guess we'll have to wait a bit longer for the League City Parkway store to attain a similar level of public endearment.  Meanwhile, we'll keep buying those breakfast tacos. 
;-)

Suburban Pests, Part 3: Wandering Wile E. revisited

Back in November, I published a blog post imploring people not to leave dog food outdoors because it attracts coyotes and other pests.  This admonition was prompted in part by a newspaper story of a coyote having to be shot inside a fenced League City back yard.

In that November post, I also mentioned seeing coyote tracks in Section 9 before it was substantially completed.  My overwhelming suspicion was that they were feeding on the abundant food scraps left by tradesmen building our 75 new houses.  At the time, I even sent pics to Meritage and Brighton in an attempt to get them to encourage their trades to observe better food hygiene and prevent a scenario in which they were inadvertently sustaining the local scavenger population.

Everyday scenes of a construction zone. With a smorgasbord like this, what four-legged critter WOULDN'T want to visit us for a midnight snack?!  Coyotes are omnivores.  They will eat just about anything.

Well, I didn't see any evidence that my public education effort was highly successful, and last night my husband and I saw what we believe was a coyote making its way into Section 9 via the eastern Arlington Pointe cul-de-sac (it could also have been a large fox, but fox are generally too smart to be seen by humans).

Coyotes generally don't present much of a risk to humans, but they have been known to dine on small pets as well as dog food and greasy tortillas.  Miniature dog breeds, cats, and the like.  We suspect strongly that we lost our previous cat to a coyote while living on the north side of Clear Lake a few years ago. 

So mind your pets and it's probably not a good idea to leave the smaller ones in your backyard for extended periods after dark.  You might also think about ensuring that some kind of shelter is available for them (small dog house or whatever), a place where they could take refuge and into which a coyote hopefully could not fit. 

Public Meeting: Main Street Implementation Plan

A public meeting will be held tomorrow (Wednesday) night at 6:00 p.m. at the Johnnie Arolfo Civic Center, 400 West Walker, to discuss League City's Main Street Implementation Plan.  For those of you not familiar with the venue, it's right up the street from Centerpointe, in the same "municipal row" that is bracketed by the police station on its west end and library to the east.

The purpose of the Implementation Plan is discussed in this morning's offering by Galveston County Daily News.  Basically, it's a plan intended to help transform League City from a place name on a map that folks drive through as they're on their way to somewhere else, and into a "destination" that offers a greater concentration of recreational and retail options. 

We'd all like to see improvements along those lines, but the instigators of this effort have quite a challenge on their hands.  It is precisely because League City is a municipal poster child for unplanned development that it is not a "destination", and it will be very hard to crack that socioeconomic development nut in any meaningful way.  The encumberances upon the city are severe and include but are not limited to the following: it is sliced in half east-west by one of the worst arterials in greater Houston (FM 518), sliced north to south by a rail line that allows crossings only at certain arterials, and many of its residents would rather stay at home than face the perils of Five Corners.  The city lacks cohesion even on the localized scale of its original core neighborhoods. 

Having been out of the country for a spell, I have not had a chance to review the Implementation Plan, but upon scanning it briefly this evening, one thing jumped out at me: strengths and weaknesses appear to have been enumerated but have not yet been assigned any kind of relative weighting. 

For instance, with respect to the "Creekside" area, which is where we lived prior to moving to Centerpointe, the Dallas Salmon Wastewater Treatment Plant is listed as a weakness, and the presence of Clear Creek is listed as a strength with development potential.  Paddle boating and other water recreational activities are listed as development possibilities.

When I read that, my first reaction was, "Holy wow, Batman!"  Did the writers of this Implementation Plan actually try to launch any watercraft of their own before presenting that idea?  I doubt it.  As a sometimes-kayaker I have, in fact, put in at the small Heritage Park boat ramp.  It is not for the faint of heart!!  The first thing a paddler has to do is run a major gauntlet of treated sewage which is literally blasting out of the adjacent Dallas Salmon Wastewater Treatment Plant at a rate of several hundred thousand gallons per hour.  Assuming you can keep your bonny craft upright through that turbulent mess long enough to make it northward toward Clear Creek proper, you run a very real risk of being mowed down by the power boaters who fly up the channel at about 40 miles per hour.  Even if they don't actually hit you, their wake vortices will easily swamp a non-motorized kayak or paddle boat.  And that water they spray up into your face in the process is, of course, largely treated sewage. 

Even if you manage to strike a calm morning with no power boats and a lower rate of effluent discharge, you still might be faced with noxious odors emanating from the plant.  According to Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) records, there were twenty-four public complaints against the plant in the period 2006 - 2009.  All but one of them pertained to foul odors. 

One of the less sophisticated complaints verbatim,
which pretty much sums up the situation.
Excerpted from
http://www.tceq.texas.gov/compliance/complaints/track.html

The chronic odor issues with that plant were one of the reasons we moved from "old town" to Centerpointe in 2010.  An installation like that just doesn't make for optimal quality of life, whether you're trying to live in that area or simply engage in recreation there.

Seriously, in sum, the whole boating / floating / water recreation thing is a nice idea, but substantial infrastructure and procedural changes would be needed before I could see it being attractive to the general public, or even do-able in a halfways safe manner. 

It's not my goal to be a naysayer, however, and hopefully some good ideas for further development will emerge from this planning and public meeting process.  If there's one thing that League City needs right about now, it's good development ideas. 

PID Practicalities

For those of you Centerpointers who, for whatever reason, may need to obtain a PID payment receipt or conduct some other transaction at the last minute (as we did pursuant to a mortgage re-finance with a lender who did not tell us up front about our requirement to do this), here's some info for ya.

There is almost no information about the relevant taxing office on our PID invoice (League City PID 3 Phase 4).  There's only a post office box with no phone, physical address, or name of the corporate oversight entity.  The only clue as to which office administers this tax was the individual name of the current Assessor, Thomas W. Lee, who I zero'd in on via Google:

This smiley guy was located via the Association of
Water Board Directors website,
http://www.awbd-tx.org/advisory.html

Again, no physical address listed, and upon phoning, I discovered that both listed lines were connected to FAX machines.  But the staff responded promptly to my email and I was able to confirm that the curious web-listed address "#5 Oaktree" refers to a tiny street on the northeast side of FM 518 about a half mile north of its intersection with FM 528.

Here.
Just before you get to this street, you'll also see a business called "Copy Doctor".
http://www.maps.google.com/

Anyway, the staff was extremely helpful and efficient in processing my payment right before the Christmas break.  Very nice folks.  And here is a list of the League City PIDs that this office represents as of the date of this blog post, and if I'm understanding things correctly here, this should include all build phases of Centerpointe:

From http://www.aswtax.com/districts/PID.pdf

And in case you're still wondering what a PID even is, this strangely-undated but recent news article in Austin American Statesman explains some of the rationale.  It's not out of the question that you might be wondering about it; as I noted in a blog post about a year ago, my husband and I were never able to determine where in our house build contract or closing statement the PID tax had been disclosed to us.  The first time we found out about it is when our bill arrived in the mail.  As I mentioned at the time of that previous blog post, nearby subdivision Victory Lakes as a concise explanation of the PID on their website. 

In case you're wondering why I'd bother to post something like this on December 25, well, life often takes on some strange scheduling when one is parent to a teenager.  There are few things that teens do as skillfully as sleeping late, and so Christmas morning festivities can sometimes turn into Christmas afternoon festivities, as those of us who maintain culturally-normal sleep/wake cycles sit around waiting for the rapidly-growing adolescents in our lives to regain consciousness. 

Have a great holiday week!
:-)

Dash cam: Epiphany

We live in an unmanageably complex society and one of the pitfalls of doing so is that it's very difficult for most people to weigh the importance of all the different risks that this society poses to them. 

Nowhere is this more true than with respect to what risks are posed to physical safety - life and limb.  A big deal was made recently of the one home invasion that occurred in Centerpointe (and it probably wasn't intended to be an invasion per se - the perps probably thought nobody was home, such that they could commit a simple burglary).  So much room was devoted to that topic in the most recent neighborhood newsletter that it had to be chopped into two halves for distribution.  And I also added a blog entry devoted to it. 

As near as I can deduce, this was the only life-threatening event of that criminal type to have occurred here.  I mean ever, in the history of the neighborhood. 

Most of the time, you won't hear me saying much about crime, other than to relay routine statistics that mostly have to do with petty theft and the odd family-violence-inspired punch in the face.

But what you WILL hear me harping about is the risk posed by road hazards.  From hyper-aggressive drivers threatening the lives of motorists and peace officers alike, to local children playing in traffic because there's nowhere else for them to go, to physical road hazards caused by careless drivers,  to people driving dangerously ON OUR SCHOOL CAMPUSES, to people flagrantly ignoring traffic control regulations both outside and inside our subdivison, I've used a dash cam to expose it all.

But up until now, there wasn't much I could offer in the way of this risk's big picture.  I could tell you, for instance, that an average of about 360 people die on Harris County roads every year...

Excerpted from:
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/departments/nrd-30/ncsa/stsi/48_TX/2010/48_TX_2010.htm

...but there was no way to actually give a perspective of that in an immediately-accessible format.

Well, there is now.   A group called ITO World has produced a map that shows all U.S. auto-related fatalities during the period 2001 - 2009. 

Screengrab of their blog entry announcing the map.
http://www.itoworld.blogspot.com/

Through some miracle of technology, these guys have managed to plot all 369,629 (!!!!) automobile-related deaths that occurred in America during that period of time.

So let's cut to the chase, zoom in and take a look at the area surrounding Centerpointe:

Icon format:
Upper left corner: Age at death.
Lower left corner:  Year of death.
Avatar: Male or female
Color: Mode of death (legend at left)

Conveniently, the map covers approximately the same period of time for which Centerpointe has been in existence.  And during that period of time, within about two mile of us, a dozen people have been killed in automobile events (I won't call them "accidents" because most of them are not "accidents" - they are the result of ignorance and recklessness). 

A DOZEN PEOPLE KILLED, just within this one unremarkable little area.  Their average age at death was just 34 years.

How they died is extremely telling:  only 17% of them were vehicle occupants.  The other 83% were traveling via less-protected means in the open air - on foot or by bicycle or motorcycle.   This is occurring in large part because we lack complete streets in our area - for the most part, we have no bike lanes and few sidewalks.  The lack of reasonable infrastructure coupled with ignorant drivers is a proven deadly combination. 

And of course, our area is not unique.

NINE PEOPLE killed in the vicinity of the NASA Road 1 intersection.

SIX PEOPLE killed in the vicinity of the El Dorado intersection.  A year or so ago, I actually wrote to TxDOT pleading with them to upgrade this antiquated intersection because it's so obviously dangerous.  It's a decades-old cloverleaf that was never designed to accomodate the volume of traffic it now must handle.  I wrote that letter to TxDOT BEFORE I knew that six people had died here in recent years.

And it doesn't stop with fatalities.  Remember also that for every automobile fatality, there's something like three times as many permanently-disabling injuries and ten times as many less-serious injuries and significant property losses (smashed cars; I've read this, but can't find the reference right now).

Moral of this story: home invasions and burglaries may grab our immediate attention, but they are not what pose the greatest risks to our physical being.  Of external physical threats, risks associated with automobiles win, hands-down.  For this reason, if you feel an urge to modify your behavior based on your perception of physical risk, you should actually feel less urge to fortify against burglars, and more urge to respond to the dangers posed to you by the carnage that continues unabated on our public rights-of-way.

Houston, we have a problem.

'Tis the Season

If you're a resident of Centerpointe, please make sure you're on the emergency e-mail blast list (contact Centerpointe.blog@gmail.com for information on that).  This thing is invaluable for heads-up, as was proven twice lately: 

• In September, when armed suspects were fleeing through or near the neighborhood after having hijacked a cigarette truck, and
• Yesterday, when a woman on Walnut Pointe emerged from her shower to find a black man standing in her hallway, having kicked in her front door, with another man upstairs apparently trying to steal her electronic equipment.   

Following yesterday's event and given that it's the Holiday Season, I have seen fit to decorate our back door according to my own personal taste:

On the BACK door, inside, inaccessible to children. 
There's only one reason why anybody would be reading this calling card: because they're about to come through that back door without an invitation.  Maybe a stocking stuffer such as this would make them think twice. 

That may seem a little extreme, but having suffered a devastating robbery previously in another neighborhood, I don't have much of a sense of humor about this stuff.  Seriously, the folks who break into residential houses around noon on weekdays are often fairly systematic about it.  They often survey an entire neighborhood, pick the best targets, and then hit them one by one over the course of time (such was the case in my former subdivision, where we were apparently the first target... the police did not catch that group until the third or fourth neighborhood break-in, I was told at the time).  In other words, just because there was one home invaded yesterday and the bad guys "ran away" does not mean that they are now "gone".  

This incident also doesn't mean that residents should over-react, but it does mean that you should double-check your home practices (for instance, don't be predictable in your coming and going behavior) and keep a sharper eye out. 

Burglaries, robberies, and home invasions happen everywhere during the holiday season in particular.  The neighborhood newsletter will have additional suggestions on safe practices when it is distributed later today.  And here's a very succinct set of safety recommendations from the Nashville police department.  I like this one because they do not mince words.