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McALLEN — Is it a park, or isn’t it?
For residents on the city’s south side, the McAllen Disc Golf Park on Ware Road — affectionately known to some by an older name, Green Jay Park — walks, talks and quacks like a park.
But for McAllen officials, the 90-acre space — which lies in a FEMA-designated special flood hazard area — isn’t a park and was never meant to be one.
“This particular piece of property was never intended to be a park. It was bought by the city to be developed,” said Michelle Rivera, the assistant city manager who oversees planning and engineering.
“We went ahead and put in some disc golf equipment for a specific event — the Games of South Texas. It was never intended to be maintained, and it hasn’t been maintained, as many of you brought up in the public hearing,” Rivera said.
She was speaking to a group of residents who had gathered at the Palm View Community Center for a town hall on Friday.
There, McAllen officials hoped to inform residents about the potential development that could occur at the site, which is not only popular among disc golfers, but also for birders, who have identified more than 100 species there.
The city came under fire earlier this spring, when residents first learned of plans to rezone the flood-prone area from “agricultural” to “light industrial” as whispers spread that some unknown company wanted to build on the land.
On Friday, that company was given a name — one already familiar to McAllen — Zoho Corporation.
WHO IS ZOHO?
Founded in Chennai, India in 1996, Zoho has built itself into a technology company with a global footprint.
It has offices in more than two dozen countries with close to 100 million users spread across 180 countries, according to Raju Vegesna, a self-proclaimed “technology evangelist” for the company.
The company left Silicon Valley for the Austin metro in 2019, setting up an elaborate headquarters in Del Valle. It opened additional offices in New Braunfels in late-2021, and here in McAllen last spring.
Thus far, Zoho employs approximately 50 people locally, but hopes to create jobs for hundreds more by building a “campus” at the site of the current disc golf course.
Vegesna described Zoho as a “slightly different company” — one that seeks to reduce brain drain from small- to mid-sized cities by creating career opportunities that young people would otherwise only find in large metropolitan areas.
“If we don’t provide opportunities for our next generation of kids, the jobs, or their career, they’re not gonna be staying in small towns. They’re gonna move to the big city,” Vegesna said.
In fact, the company’s entire corporate philosophy is one of investing in the communities they become a part of — not just through economic and job investments, but also through investments in quality of life.
In its Del Valle location, for example, the company planted an orchard where fruit and other foods are grown. Any harvest excesses are donated to local nonprofits, Vegesna said.
The company has also planted thousands of trees at that site, and has worked to create commercial buildings that are done on what Vegesna called a “human scale” — with buildings that are no larger than three stories tall and parking lots that are obscured by purposeful landscaping.
“We expect this to be an ecological paradise,” Vegesna said, adding that the company would take local plant and animal species into account if they are allowed to develop the land.
The company also seeks out partnerships with local colleges, and has already made progress on such efforts here, Vegesna said.
NOT IN MY BACK YARD
For the residents who attended Friday’s town hall, the company’s plans to invest in McAllen — and to do so in a way that stresses such a strong sense of corporate social responsibility — sound like a great idea.
Just not at Green Jay Park.
“This totally goes against the city of McAllen providing a better quality of life,” said Gloria Galindo, a McAllen resident whose family often uses the park to enjoy the greenspace for birdwatching.
“You could actually put this development anywhere else,” she said.
Another resident, Victoria Guerra, echoed similar sentiments.
“You’re walking all over us, doing this, shoving this down our throats, even though we don’t want it,” Guerra said.
Just 7.9% of the city is made up of parks and green spaces, officials said.
That figure does not include the 90-acre disc golf park.
Aside from concerns that McAllen would be eliminating one of the city’s few green spaces — and one of the rarer still to include old growth forest — residents shared their worries that any development would exacerbate flooding in the area.
After the historic summer storm of 2018, so much flood water stagnated in the South McAllen area that one resident referred to it as “an ocean” where people used jet skis to traverse.
Officials acknowledged the seriousness of the issue, adding that McAllen has invested more than $60 million in drainage improvements throughout the city since 2018.
McAllen is also currently in the process of submitting data to FEMA to ascertain if the land can be developed at all.
“There is a process that has to be followed through FEMA where you actually have to show them — if you bring any new development into the area, to this special flood hazard area — you basically have to mitigate,” explained Mario Cruz, deputy engineer for the city.
To that end, McAllen has already hired a consultant to perform hydrological modeling of the site’s current conditions, and how any development changes would affect future flood events.
“We’ve been working on that for over a year now and putting a package together that we can submit to FEMA,” Cruz said.
McAllen District 5 Commissioner Victor “Seby” Haddad then spoke up, saying this may serve as an opportunity for the city to not just maintain the flood-prone status quo of the area, but to improve conditions.
“An opportunity like this for pre- and post-development, the goal is not always just to get parity … it provides the city the opportunity to improve some of the drainage issues that we have today,” Haddad said.
Haddad wasn’t the only elected official to attend Friday’s town hall to take the pulse of the community. Also there were District 2 Commissioner Joaquin “J.J.” Zamora and District 4 Commissioner Rodolfo “Rudy” Castillo, in whose district the disc golf course lies.
TENSIONS RISE
But, as the discussions went on, residents became increasingly frustrated with the responses they were hearing from city officials.
For one, if the disc golf course is not a park, then why does the entrance bear a sign calling it one, residents asked.
“If it’s not a disc golf park, why is it that every time I run a disc golf tournament there, I’m being charged to reserve the park?” asked Leo de la Rosa, with Sweet Azz Glass, a disc golf supply store on South Main Street.
De la Rosa said he pays the McAllen Parks and Recreation Department reservation fees several times a year to host disc golfing events at the park.
“We’re not here to talk about parks, we’re here to talk about a development,” replied Rivera, the assistant city manager, shortly after saying that the site generates low revenues.
But again, residents rebutted the idea that the 90-acre plot of land is not a park.
“Green Jay Park, McAllen Disc Golf Park — it walks like a park, it talks like a park, it’s called a park by everyone, it has a huge sign on the outside that says it’s a park,” Galindo, the birder, said.
“It’s a park,” she emphasized.
Residents also worried about the stress that additional development would place on existing roadways — in particular, Neuhaus Drive, which lies just north of the historic resaca, Lake Concepcion.
Currently, Neuhaus Drive exists as a narrow two-lane road with no shoulders. It can barely accommodate the two-way traffic it has now, residents said.
Nor does the city have any plans to improve the roadway.
City officials also declined to say if they will sell the land to Zoho, saying only that determining its developability is important regardless of whether Zoho chooses to locate here.
“From the very beginning, when they (Zoho) came to town, they identified this as one of the areas that they were interested in. And since we already had an idea that we were going to be developing the project, we decided … this is the time to start looking at it,” Rivera said.
But that doesn’t track with what Vegesna said after the town hall.
Vegesna said Zoho approached city officials to express their interest in expanding into McAllen and asked how to go about doing so.
It was the city that showed Zoho several potential sites.
“We saw several options and we said … ‘How do we move forward with setting up and acquiring land here in McAllen so we can set up an office,’” Vegesna said.
It’s clear, however, that McAllen is eager for the tech company to choose the city.
“Knowing all the backlash you’d get, how much it would affect not only the residents of the property, the whole community itself, wouldn’t it be a good idea to look at another space that wouldn’t take a green space?” one resident asked to the applause of other residents.
“We have to do what’s best for the community and the entire community needs jobs,” Rivera replied.
