For 20 years, a four-story mound of dirt has overlooked Sunnyside near a bend in Sims Bayou, piled high with earth that the Harris County Flood Control District dug out to create a nearby floodwater detention basin.
The site was never designed for public use.
Now, the peak is surrounded by work trucks carting dirt and laying pathway reinforcements to turn it into a new park.
“We don’t generally have 60-foot-tall hills anywhere in Houston.
But the vast majority of the time since this facility was built, it’s basically not been accessible to the public,” said Trent Rondot, conservation and maintenance director of the Houston Parks Board, on a recent tour of the area’s Bayou Greenways.
“Now we’re working with the Harris County Flood Control District and Harris County Precinct 1 to create park space, green space, in this spot,” he said.
Rondot explained with excitement that the park should be ready to visit by the end of the year.
It will include concrete paths, a hilltop lookout, a parking lot and restrooms, along with mixed-use grassy fields, landscaping and picnic areas.
The project, known as the Hill at Sims Park, is one of many recent attempts in the Houston area to convert much-needed flood control infrastructure into usable land when water levels are low.
While the Harris County Flood Control District said it has long been on board with these multipurpose plans, its funding is often restricted to flood risk reduction efforts, so it relies on partners to turn drab basins and channels into usable green spaces.
“We know it presents an immense opportunity for the community,” said Emily Woodell, spokeswoman for the flood control district.
“From soccer fields and parks to trails and bike paths, we can reduce flood risks while creating amenities for Harris County residents and visitors to enjoy.”
Flood mitigation efforts and parks are expanding.
As Houston’s severe flooding risks have mounted, so have the district’s plans to give that water somewhere to go.
A sweeping post-Harvey plan to knock at-risk structures out of the area’s 100-year floodplain has been drawn up and kicked off in piecemeal construction phases based on available funding.
The county expects revised FEMA flood maps this spring will increase the area’s flood estimates, adding urgency to new infrastructure plans.
District representatives said they currently have about 2,500 linear miles of channel in the Harris County area — the distance from Los Angeles to New York — and over 380 stormwater detention basins, deep holes in the earth designed to hold back floodwater temporarily from channels and bayous in order to slow the flow and stave off downstream flooding.
All told, the Harris County Flood Control District is responsible for about 60,000 acres of land, including the floodplain areas it merely preserves.
Some of that land is just empty floodplain, basin and channel; but increasingly, county and city entities are taking up the mantle and building in usable green spaces for communities.
“We’re incredibly supportive of dual-purpose use of our drainage infrastructure.
We do look for opportunities and partnerships wherever and whenever it makes sense,” the district’s Woodell said.
She pointed to Keith Wiess Park that sits north of downtown, El Franco Lee Park in the southeast and Cypress Park in the northwest as other examples of the strategy, for which the flood control district partners with everyone from Harris County precincts to the city of Houston, to nonprofits like the Houston Parks Board, to municipal utility districts.
A not-so-new mound of earth in Sunnyside is part of the plan for a new lofted view of the city, championed by Commissioner Rodney Ellis and the Houston Parks Board.
They are among the partners bringing the vision to life.
“Unfortunately, not all neighborhoods and communities in Harris County have the same access to quality green spaces,” Ellis said back in 2021 in a community meeting for public input in the process.
The commissioner noted that this project near his own childhood home is one of many designed to make park access more equitable.
According to the Houston Parks Board’s Rondot, though, the idea to create a park and nature preserve along Sims Bayou predated these community engagement efforts by a couple of decades.
Rondot said that the Harris County Flood Control District “had a vision” when digging the detention basin in 2005 that the area would eventually be accessible to the public.
So they left the massive mound of dirt on the basin’s edge on purpose.
“What’s cool, from up on top of that hill, you get a really good view of the med center, and NRG stadium and all of that.
You can see downtown from up there,” Rondot said.
When completed, the trail will wrap around the detention basin and funnel into the Houston Parks Board’s existing Sims Bayou Greenway along Scott Street, one puzzle piece within the 150-mile network of linear trails the group has built along bayous throughout the city.
Beth White, president and CEO of the Houston Parks Board, said the Hill at Sims was an example of what more Houston green spaces might look like in years to come.
“We’re working more and more closely with the Harris County Flood Control District,” White said.
“Land is expensive.
We have to make sure we’re using our land for more than one purpose.”
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