By David Robledo 
The Paper of South Texas

Oct 11, 2007

Winter visitors organize voting bloc to show the Cameron County commission how serious they are about keeping private development away from the Isla Blanca natural treasure.

Sam Midkiff starts in on his second glass of white wine at a small Mexican restaurant in Los Fresnos. Stout and with a reddish tan, he’s one of about 36,000 Cameron County residents – mostly Winter Texans – who signed a petition earlier this year demanding that local officials keep the county-owned Isla Blanca Park free from private development.
   Commissioners have already somewhat buckled to the pressure of Midkiff and other Winter Texans fighting against the county — as they wielded their clout throughout the summer against a development deal they said gave away a Texas treasure to private interests.
   In March 2005, Cameron County signed a lease agreement with the Laguna Madre Enhancement Group that would have allowed the construction of a new marina, condos, a state-of-the-art aquarium and — most notably — a casino smack in the middle of the existing Isla Blanca Park.
   Developers, in turn, promised up to five percent of gross revenues, with a minimum of $300,000 during the first two years and $600,000 after.
   But it wasn’t until several months after the lease had been signed that residents noticed the deal had been sealed and that the planned development could affect how the public uses the park.
   The county commissioners and judge Gilberto Hinojosa said they properly listed the lease agreement in agenda items for commissioners court meetings, but because they described the lease as a “concession” agreement, Midkiff and other protesters say the county was in fact trying to hide its true intention about Isla Blanca.
   “When you hear ‘concession’ agreement, you think of snow cones, not a casino,” Midkiff said.
   Realizing that the decades-old RV Park and access to a public beach that sees more than a million visitors a year was being threatened, the community organized — swarming commission meetings with protests meant to let county leaders know that somebody was watching their every move. They said Isla Blanca Park is one of the most beautiful parks in the state. The high-rise parking garage on the blueprint would kill its quaint appeal, the planned casino (built on environmentally sensitive sand dunes, no less), would bring excessive traffic and crime to a zone now characterized by children feeding sea gulls and splashing in the surf.
   And what’s worse, the group said, is that the developer had the right to build hotels and condominiums on public land.
   By mid-July, after pummeling protests, the county voted to end the lease agreement — only to return with a new lease agreement a month later that seemed suspiciously similar to the first one. The problem was that commissioners never actually had the power to end the existing agreement. When the commissioners court went back to renegotiate with Laguna Madre Enhancement Group, bargaining power was in the builder’s hands, since commissioner had already signed away the park.
   The new contract allows the developer to carry out the same plan protesters opposed, with only a few acres (used now for the RV park and beach access) off limits — and with a reversion clause that would still allow commissioners to do away with public beach access and the camping area if they choose.
   With their backs against the wall, residents fighting the development — including the Save Isla Blanca Park committee as well as a local chapter of the national Surfriders Association — are doing what little they can to make their disapproval known.
   If the contract isn’t rewritten in a way that definitively limits development, Winter Texans involved in the fray say that they’ll gather their forces to oust the county judge.

SIGNING AWAY THE FARM
With 130,000 Winter Texans who call the Rio Grande Valley home between September and March, the force of a Winter Texan voting bloc could possibly control elections in any Rio Grande Valley county.
   In 2002’s General Election, for example, about 45,000 Cameron County voters showed up at the polls.
   Save Isla Blanca Park members figure that if they can even get a small proportion of the 36,000 people who signed their original petition to register to vote in Cameron County, they’ll be able to sway the upcoming county election.
   So far, a few hundred of those protesters have agreed to change their residences to allow them to vote in Cameron County. And with a Tuesday (10.10) registration deadline, organizers had a lot of work to do to track people down and register those petitioners to vote.
   Organizers aren’t yet sure exactly how many who signed the petition are Winter Texans, but they estimate between 80 and 90 percent.
   The county judge has criticized the Save Isla Blanca Park group for making this conflict political. He said that the new contract gives county leaders the same power they have always possessed — to enter into any agreement with the Laguna Madre Enhancement Group that they consider appropriate and beneficial to Cameron County.
   “All I’m saying is that issue of being able to develop Isla Blanca Park is a constitutional right that belongs to this commission,” Hinojosa said.
   But the Save Isla Blanca resistance points out that the new contract gives the builder the absolute power to approve or deny any new Isla Blanca Park improvements — and it also requires the county to provide legal defense to the developer in case it gets sued.
   “This deal stinks,” said Delton Lee, a Save Isla Blanca Park member.
   Lee said that several attorneys consulting pro-bono with Save Isla Blanca couldn’t figure out why the county would give so many rights to public space that is basically priceless.
   With water surrounding the site on three sides — the $8 million assessment of the mile-long, pristine dune and shoreline is more appropriately valued in the hundreds of millions.
   But Lee, a developer himself, said that placing any monetary value on the park misses the point entirely.
   There are no high-rise condos in the middle of New York City’s Central Park, or at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
   Isla Blanca should be no different, Lee said, and now that the county has signed over development rights for the next hundred years — as stipulated in the contract — Cameron County seems to have no way to backtrack.

PUNISHING THE ONE WHO BEARS THE BLAME
With this week’s deadline for voter registration, Winter Texans organizing the vote had their work cut out for them. On Sunday, they held a fundraiser and voter registration drive at Brownsville’s Hurricane’s Bar, where hundreds of supporters stopped in to back this ongoing fight. And late into the night and early each morning since, Save Isla Blanca and Surfrider members were on the phones and computers, getting the message out that the only apparent solution is to oust the one who bears the most blame — the county judge himself. Hinojosa’s opponent, Carlos Cascos, has expressed his support for Save Isla Blanca Park, but thanks to the apparently ironclad contract with the Laguna Madre Enhancement Group, there’s probably little anyone can do at this point to turn back the clock. Unless the development group fails to follow through with the few stipulations on their end of the deal — like finishing construction projects within two years, or paying out on the rental fees — county residents are stuck with this deal.PARADISE SOON TO BE LOSTFor now, the Isla Blanca park on the south end of South Padre Island is still teeming with day-trippers and anglers casting deep lines off the park’s jetties. And dolphins still surface at the park’s southwest corner, where children can get a peek at those intelligent mammals as they surface and play, greeting oncoming boats and airing their communicative clicks.
 Isla Blanca is in many senses as close to paradise as you can get in deep South Texas, said Faith Ballesteros, who founded the Save Isla Blanca group because the park is her favorite spot to take her three young children to play in the surf and sand.
 “The saddest thing here is that the commissioners court had this opportunity to protect something so valuable, something so much a part of the memories and lives of so many Valley residents and visitors,” she said.
 “But in the end, what was forgotten was the true beauty that lies here. When the sun sets at Isla Blanca, there’s no other place in the world I would rather be.”