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McALLEN — After listening to more than an hour of comments from residents trying to save a cherished greenspace, it took the McAllen Planning and Zoning board just a few seconds to vote down the request to rezone the McAllen Disc Golf Park for commercial and industrial use.
“I think that we’ve already heard everything we need to hear,” P&Z Chair Michael Fallek said before calling for a vote to disapprove the rezoning request.
The P&Z board’s unanimous vote was met with applause from the dozens of residents who showed up to the meeting en masse to save the park on the city’s south side.
As they celebrated, the representatives from the Austin tech company who hoped to develop the site quietly filed out of the legislative chamber.
Wednesday’s P&Z decision throws a monkey wrench into plans by Zoho Corporation to build a technology campus on the 90-acre site, which some also call Green Jay Park.
Over the last year, the city of McAllen has been heavily courting the tech company, which promises to build a facility with corporate social responsibility top of mind — one where local talent can stay in the Rio Grande Valley, and in turn, reinvest in the community.
As the company’s own representatives said Wednesday, Zoho is a “company with a different purpose.”
“We figured that a lot of people are moving from the Valley to Austin and that ain’t right,” Raju Vegesna, a self-proclaimed “technology evangelist” for Zoho, told the P&Z board.
“We felt it’s actually appropriate that the company should move to where the talent is, not the other way around,” he added.
The company wants to build a campus on a “human scale” — one that is in harmony with the nature around it.
According to a presentation provided by the company, Zoho hopes to develop approximately eight acres of the nearly 90-acre park, leaving much of the land untouched.
At their offices in Del Valle, just outside of Austin, Zoho created a headquarters that includes an orchard with fruit trees and other food crops.
The company has similar plans here.
During a town hall earlier this month, Vegesna said Zoho hopes to turn the park into an “ecological paradise.”
But for many McAllen residents, it already is.
More than 100 bird species have been sighted among the park’s old growth forests and the riparian habitat that lines a historic resaca on the land, Lake Concepcion.
Of the more than a dozen people who spoke against the rezoning request, not a single one had a negative thing to say about Zoho itself.
In fact, many openly welcomed the company to the city. But the resounding question residents had was why Green Jay Park?
Aside from fears that development would exacerbate flooding or further congest traffic, the overarching concern for most residents was the loss of one of the city’s few green spaces.
It was a concern picked up on by members of the P&Z board itself.
“Why is it that we need to take a piece of property that is used for something else and turn it into more industrial or commercial property?” Fallek asked Vegesna.
Vegesna said Zoho had looked at various properties throughout town and that the park seemed like a “good location.” At the time, however, Zoho had been unaware of what the public pushback would be.
One resident also had a question over the rezoning classification itself.
The P&Z board considered two separate, but related matters — one, to rezone a portion of the property as commercial and the other to rezone a portion as light industrial.
The commercial portion of the request would be where the technology campus would be built.
“But why is the planning department requesting it to be zoned industrial?” resident and avid birder Gloria Galindo asked.
“They must know what’s going in there,” she said.
A city staffer explained that the company hasn’t yet shared plans for what would go on the industrial-zoned portion of the land.
“They just know that they would like it for it to be ready in case they have a light industrial use. But again, there has been no plans, there aren’t any plans right now and to accept the rezoning we don’t need plans, all we need is the zoning application as of right now,” the staffer said.
Ultimately, the board sided with the local community.
“I was born and raised in South McAllen and I’ve seen how it gets in that area, South Ware and South 23rd. With that being said, I move to disapprove,” board member Jose Saldaña said.
But just after the P&Z board unanimously voted down the two rezoning requests, Fallek, the board chair, reminded residents that their fight to save Green Jay Park is not over.
“We are an advisory board, the city commission gets to make its own decisions,” Fallek said.
“So everything that was said here and the passion that was expressed, you all need to repeat that to the city commission because, again, they can vote on the project separately from this board,” he said.
The McAllen City Commission is expected to take up the issue later this month and can overturn the P&Z’s decision with a supermajority vote.
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Fate of beloved McAllen park still unclear after contentious town hall
