Passport to Texas

Cedar Hill State Park, photo © Texas Parks and Wildlife Department

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This is Passport to Texas

Memorial Day floods swept through communities in Texas taking lives and homes, and they also struck more than 50 state parks.

05– And so, we’re going to have a lot of rebuilding and restoring in the weeks and months, and really, years ahead.

Carter Smith is Texas Parks and Wildlife Executive Director. As the rivers and creeks along many state parks recede, park employees are assessing the damage and are grateful that no one was injured. Yet, Texas Parks and Wildlife will feel the loss of revenue from visitor fees, which pay about half the cost to run the state park system.

08– Because of the diminished visitation–because the parks simply aren’t accessible now or will be in the near future–that’s going to have a significant impact on the agency.

However, there is hope for recovery.

16– Looks like the Legislature is going to provide some significant capital funding this session, but we are going to obviously have to look at re-prioritizing it. Address the tyranny of the urgent. And right now the tyranny of the urgent is all of the flooding that resulted from this horrific Memorial Day Flood event.

Keep up with park recovery progress when you visit texasstateparks.org.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 3rd, 2015 at 12:00 am and is filed under State Parks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.