Remember those bad horror movies in which a villain everybody thought was dead comes back to life?

Zombie alert: Houston City Council this week faces the revival of a truly awful idea that people who followed the story probably thought had already been killed. Call it “A Nightmare on Bagby Street.”

Maybe that sounds like a joke, but this arcane agenda item is deadly serious. Mayor Sylvester Turner and the City Council will once again consider authorizing the creation of a municipal utility district for a new subdivision on what’s now a golf course in the middle of a floodplain. It’s the dreadful sequel to a bad, original production that never should have appeared on the agenda.

EDITORIAL: City Hall must reject the pre-Harvey status quo of paving over the floodplain

Appropriately enough, Houston Chronicle reporter Mike Morris first reported on this matter last Halloween, just two months after Hurricane Harvey. Meritage Homes drew up plans to build about 800 houses on the site of the old Pine Crest Golf Club, a property that’s located entirely in a floodplain. The site sits roughly two miles from the Addicks Dam, and it’s centered around the Brickhouse Gully floodway.

Even worse, last fall’s original motion to create a municipal utility district for the new subdivision came up just a week after the Council approved spending $10 million to buy out dozens of houses in flood-prone locations, some of them directly downstream. After a public outcry, this stunningly tone deaf proposal was pulled off the table and “referred back to the administration,” a phrase that’s usually a City Hall euphemism for quietly burying an agenda item forever.

EDITORIAL: Too many special districts proved incapable of handling Hurricane Harvey

Alas, it’s back. Our mayor and City Council should use this opportunity to send a message that Hurricane Harvey has fundamentally changed our city’s culture, that unbridled development in floodplains is no longer acceptable.

After last year’s disaster, hydrologists have pointed to abandoned golf courses as golden opportunities, natural sponges for soaking up floodwaters. Pine Crest is the last place Houston should be encouraging new development. Even with the new post-Harvey land-use rules, construction in the floodplain will still risk exacerbating downtstream flooding.

Dr. Steven Klineberg’s newly released Houston Area Survey indicates two-thirds of Houstonians believe more stringent development regulations would have significantly reduced the damage wrought by Hurricane Harvey. At a time when Houston is lobbying the federal government for billions of dollars in disaster recovery funds, allowing this proposal to sail through City Council would be a startling act of bad faith. The mayor and City Council should kill this zombie idea for good.