Inside the Moon
Yard of the Month A2
Farewell, Duchess A5
Senior Moments A7
The
Issue 681
Island Moon
The voice of The Island since 1996
May 4, 2017
Beauteous Birds A11
Live Music A18
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Photo by Miles Merwin
Around The Island
On the Rocks
Snapper Season Shortened
By Dale Rankin A fellow from way up north was standing next to his RV on the beach when he flagged us down. “Why is everyone camping up in the dunes?” was his query.
By Jay Gardner Three days. That’s all we get. Three lousy days for the federal snapper season. It starts June 1st on a Thursday and ends Saturday night at midnight. Not even a full weekend. Basically one weekend day, and I’m betting five bucks that it will be windy and sloppy and very few boats will go out. This will be the third year in a row that neither myself, nor any of the rest of the crew will make it out. I’m supposed to be out of town that weekend anyway. Blink and you’ll miss the entire season.
“You see that line of seaweed way up there by the dunes, that’s the high tide line. The tide is two feet over normal right now.” “Well, I’ll be gone by the time the tide comes in,” he says, and he wasn’t the only one. We resisted the urge to tell him that salt water is great for washing his car, by the end of the day he was going to have enough problems.
The high tides and changing winds have been a boon for Island surfers in recent days.
The high tides were claiming victims all up and down our beaches this week as unsuspecting tent campers, chair sitters, and fire builders found themselves unexpectedly under water as the tide rolled in.
More than one beach event had to be moved since our flat beaches can’t stand up to a two foot higher than normal tide. Beach driving has been a messy business at high tide so if you are planning trip down PINS check the tide charts in this issue first. We are starting to see some sargassum weed wash up. The city is about to put up signs explaining to visitors that while the stuff may not smell too good it provides habitat for sea life and is part of the natural process. Then again, so are hurricanes, that doesn’t mean we have to like them.
Seawall ownership change About a quarter of the land behind the Michael J. Ellis Seawall changed hands this week with the purchase of the Austin-based Forestar group which owns about 1100 feet of the land along the seawall and until last year owned the Tortuga Dunes development on Zahn Road. The new owners are the Connecticut- based Starwood Capital group who paid $605 million for the company. The deal won’t be finished until the third quarter of 2017 so it’s too early to tell what the effect on the seawall land may be.
Good news for Seashore Charter schools The Texas Senate passed a bill this week that could be good news for Island charter schools if it makes it through the House. Senate Bill 457 would increase the facility funding program for both public schools and charter schools. Currently charter schools get no state funding for buildings. US News & World Report recently ranked the 25 best high schools in Texas and 12 of them are charter schools and which have approximately 250,000 students in Texas and over 141,000 students on wait lists, according to state figures. We will keep an eye on the bill in the House as the session winds down in Austin this month.
Changing Island And finally, we got a call this week from a reader complaining that The Island is changing. “It’s growing too fast and it isn’t like it was when I moved here,” she said. We get that a lot from The Bridgedroppers. “It was different then.” “How long have you lived here? “Almost a year now.” Say hello if you see us Around The Island.
Schlitterbahn Owners Attempt to Push Island Park into Bankruptcy
Mayoral Election on Saturday
A total of 15,029 voters cast early ballots in the race for Corpus Christi Mayor. Early Voting ended Tuesday and Election Day is this Saturday, May 6. There is no way to determine how many Islanders voted since it is not required that they cast ballots in the precinct where they live; in both Early Voting and on Election Day voters can do to any polling location in the city. At the only voting location on The Island 1044 ballots were cast, there are just over 7200 registered voters in the two largest Island precincts. By Dale Rankin A company owned by the Henry family, owners of Schlitterbahn waterparks across the state, filed a petition in bankruptcy court Monday asking a judge to declare Upper Padre Partners, which owns the Schlitterbahn park on The Island, in default of payment of $4,655,046 from the park to ancillary companies owned by the Henry family and to push the company into Chapter 11 (reorganization) bankruptcy. The complicated legal entanglement began at 8 p.m. Monday, just hours before 270 acres of land adjacent to the park and owned by Upper Padre Partners was scheduled to be auctioned off on the steps of the Nueces County Courthouse. The auction did not take place. The plaintiffs in the petition, which was filed in the bankruptcy court in the Western District of Texas in San Antonio, are Schlitterbahn North Padre Water Resort Management and Waterpark Management, Inc. and signed by Gary Henry, one of the principals in the Schlitterbahn parent company. The ironic twist is that the Henry family, aside from owning the companies which filed the petition,
also owns a two-third interest in Upper Padre Partners, the company which is the defendant in the case and which the filing is attempting to push into involuntary bankruptcy. The original agreement between the Henry’s separate interests and UPP called for the park to be completed and turned over to UPP for operation in 2014. Due to cost overruns and an expansion and changes of the original plans for the park a dispute arose between the UPP partners, the Henry family and IslandWalk Development which owns the other third and is managed by developer Paul Schexnailder. That dispute is currently part of a binding arbitration process required in the UPP contract and ownership of the park never passed from the Henry’s companies to UPP and is currently operated by affiliates of the Henry family. Monday’s filing does not mean that the Schlitterbahn park on The Island is in bankruptcy. It is a request by Schlitterbahn North Padre Management, a Henry family company, to force UPP, and therefore the park, into bankruptcy over the claimed $4.6 million debt. The claim
Bankruptcy cont. on A4
A problem arose Wednesday, after Early Voting ended, involving a small group of residents of Mustang Island who are in Precinct 19 which includes Port Aransas, but who live in the Corpus Christi City Limits. They pay school taxes to Port Aransas Independent School District which has a $6 million bond election underway which is not on the ballots in the Corpus Christi mayor’s race meaning that those voters must choose between voting in the mayor’s race or the bond election. Nueces County Clerk Kara Sands said Wednesday said that since PAISD is running the bond election themselves it was inadvertently left off the Corpus Christi ballot. Election Day voting is at the Veranda at Schlitterbahn waterpark from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. There are eight candidates in the mayor’s race, in the ballot order they are Jonathan Garison, Ray Madrigal, Nelda Martinez, Joe McComb, Margareta Fratila, James M. Hernandez, Mark A. Di Carlo, and Larry White. Island voters, through the Island United Political Action Committee, endorsed At-Large Councilman Joe McComb in the race.
There was a hearing on Capitol Hill Tuesday that was quite lengthy. Congressman Blake Farenthold is actually the chair of the subcommittee on the Interior, Energy, and Environment, and did a good job of receiving testimony from a panel of “experts.” There were four people on the panel, one was obviously a shill for NMFS control (as opposed to state control) a commercial fisherman from the northeast (?), the head of Alabama’s Parks and Wildlife, and local Mark Ray, who is the Chairman of CCA-Texas. The questions by the Congresspersons on the panel obviously had pre-meditated answers, however some of the inadequacies of the federal government regulations were exposed. People are outraged, and some Congress representatives let everyone know that their constituents are not having it.
The question is; will anything come of the testimony? Mark seems to think that the “tide is changing,” although it always takes a lot of time for new ideas to actually be implemented in government. You know how that goes. So we’re stuck with being
Snapper cont. on A4
A little Island history
The Last of the Island Pirates
In May, 1817 the last group of Mexican troops left Galveston Island to fight Royalist Mexican forces elsewhere in Texas and on April 15 of that year the pirate Jean Lafitte moved in and set up a government of his own nominally subject to the Republic of Mexico. He brought with him more than 1000 men and a fleet of warships engaged in smuggling, slave running, and piracy. In New Orleans he had done business with such Texas luminaries as James and Rezin Bowie, J.W. Fannin, and William B. Travis, among others. When he arrived in Texas he began plying the waters of the Texas Coast looking for inlets, bays, and coves where he could hide when necessary and soon set up a base on what was
known as Culebra Island composed of Matagorda and St. Joseph’s islands. The two Islands were separated by Cedar Bayou which could be navigated by a good sized bark coming from the Gulf of Mexico and could enter an inlet from which either St. Charles or San Antonio bay could be reached. The mouths of the rivers feeding these bays, as well as Aransas and Copano bays, made good concealing landing places for smuggled goods. Smuggler’s Creek located in Calhoun County was a favorite haunt, as well as Barkantine Creek and Copano Creek in presentday Refugio County. First Spanish and then Mexican governments responded to Lafitte’s presence with a fort at Aranzazu on Live Oak Point. Lafitte in turn
responded with a fort of his own on the southwest part of St. Joseph’s Island. The village of Aransas was later laid out near the site of the pirate fort.
The days of piracy are over The last recorded sighting of Lafitte was in 1921 and comes down to us from a lady named Madam Frank, known by most as Grandma Frank, who lived and died at False Live Oak Point in the original Refugio County near the mouth of the Guadalupe River in a house overlooking Espiritu Santo Bay where she was living when Lafitte broke up his pirate band. Frank claimed to be a witness to the group’s last meeting at the approximate location of what is now Aransas Pass. Her account is as follows:
Jean Lafitte History cont. on A4