Lake Conroe to Kingwood: Look elsewhere for help with...

CONROE — Homeowners who live along Lake Conroe were mad. They were mad they couldn’t get their boats in the water. Mad their homes might lose value. Mad they were spending thousands to shore up bulkheads that no longer had water pushing against them.

The San Jacinto River Authority, which operates Lake Conroe in Montgomery County, had agreed after Hurricane Harvey to lower the lake by 1 foot in the spring and 2 feet in the fall. Residents around the lake at first tolerated the policy, which was intended to help prevent flooding in places down the river such as storm-battered Kingwood. But, with it up for annual renewal in February, hundreds were now saying enough was enough.

The clash pits suburb against suburb more than two years after Harvey caused catastrophic damage, highlighting how hard it is to find flooding solutions as concern about the risk falls. Lowering Lake Conroe offered a quick way for officials to store more water should heavy rains return. The argument at hand is over how much exactly it helps — and whether it justifies the inconvenience to lakeside residents.

This past week, the two sides marched into battle at a packed public hearing in a Conroe convention center, where each speaker was given three minutes to state his or her case. The crowd included three busloads of residents that David Hartman tailed down Texas 105 from Walden on Lake Conroe.

Along the way, they passed a “Save the Lake!” billboard. The driver of an F-150 waved his “STOP THE DROP” t-shirt from the window. Hartman, the general manager of Walden’s homeowners’ association, pointed left from the driver’s seat of his Suburban to a view of the lake.

“This is an economic power right here,” Hartman said. “This is why this part of the county is growing so fast.”

But those from Kingwood turned out, too, urging the board to continue lowering the lake seasonally until 2022. By then, they hope, officials will be done dredging in — and installing gates at — Lake Houston, where the river’s water flows before pouring into Galveston Bay.

Hartman pulled into the convention center’s parking lot an hour before the meeting’s start, and the 600 chairs there were already filling up. The Conroe-area residents wished the Kingwood folks would direct their anger at government officials. Kingwood people wished the Conroe residents would get a grip.

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Lake Conroe was built about 50 miles north of downtown Houston to be an eventual source for drinking water. It was completed in 1973, when Montgomery County had fewer than 100,000 residents, and neighborhoods grew up all around. The suburban enclaves feel wholly different from the city, with a rare slice of nature to enjoy.

Residents, noticing an invasive plant, years ago created the Lake Conroe Association to get rid of it. The current president, Mike Bleier, has lead the anti-lake lowering movement with fervor, giving presentations and organizing volunteers. He framed the campaign as a fight for the area’s economic vitality — a man-made problem different from 10 years ago when drought conditions caused lake levels to drop severely.

Bleier, a former river authority board member, knew as well as anyone how Hurricane Harvey had devastated Kingwood. Flooded residents effectively became homeless. High school students attended classes at another school while their campus was rebuilt. But he believes lowering the lake hurts his area more than it could help those downstream.

As he sees it, the policy was a haphazard fix that officials offered as evidence they were doing something. “We were the instantaneous, no-cost project,” he said.

Indeed, lowering Lake Conroe was the easy way to store water during storm events while officials looked into other flood-related projects.

Jenna Armstrong, president of the Lake Houston Area Chamber of Commerce, which launched the “Lives over Levels” campaign on the other side, argues that the extra storage is a necessity.

Lake Conroe can only fill up so much before its dam risks failure, so operators during storms might release water through gates. It flows down the west fork of the San Jacinto River to Lake Houston, the destination for much of the area’s water. “We’re in a massive watershed,” Armstrong said. “We are basically the bathtub drain.”

As it stands, Chuck Gilman, who oversees the river authority’s recently created flood management division, cannot say exactly how the policy of lowered lake levels would have changed things in Kingwood. But he sees the issue as bigger than Conroe vs. Kingwood. And he does know that it helps communities downstream writ large.“There’s certainly a benefit,” Gilman said, with a calculation to prove it.

If the lake is 2 feet lower than standard during a 100-year storm — which has a 1 percent chance of occurring in a year — the west fork of the river, flowing at its highest, is 9 inches lower when it passes under Interstate 45.

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All seven San Jacinto River Authority board members, appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, sat on a stage facing the energized residents who filled what was now 1,000 chairs in the Lone Star Convention & Expo Center on Tuesday night. Even more attendees stood around the room’s edge.

Board members already had received hundreds of impassioned notes, some scrawled on bills for dock fees. A Conroe-area business owner told of the financial hit of needing to relocate his docks. A father, lamenting the lost time riding a Jet Ski with his 7-year-old son, sent his child’s drawing depicting the pair frowning on a dock far above water.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner urged the authority in a letter to continue lowering the lake. The city owns two-thirds of the water; it also annexed Kingwood decades ago. A woman from Kingwood, whose home flooded, declared the Conroe perspective “complete silliness.”

Now board members looked out onto a sea of red — the Conroe folks turned out in red t-shirts — with pockets of Lake Houston-area folks in white.

Tensions ran high. Some arrived with the feeling that they had worked hard to build their dream lakeside homes — and didn’t think it fair they suffer for the region’s failure to plan. “I have to look at the weeds,” A.J. Corso said during the meeting. “I have to look at the mud.”

“What about my house?” someone in the crowd shouted.

That argument of robbed delight falls on deaf ears for those from areas where people piled soaked belongings on the curb. “It devastated the communities,” said Bob Rehak, who writes a blog on flooding issues. “These people up there have no idea what happened down here.”

Indeed, in Gary Eiland’s Saturday golf group in Bentwater, they lament how some can’t safely step from the dock to their boat. They are sad that next to the 14th hole on the Miller golf course — one of three in the neighborhood — dirt and plants occupy a space where there used to be lake water.

But that’s just a piece of it, he and others say, and they feel wrongly accused. “They made us the Bogeyman up here,’” said Matt Newsom, sporting a Bass Pro Shops jacket, a reminder of the big-draw fishing tournaments that also stood to suffer.

All were here now, waiting for the hearing to begin. It would drag on for hours, with boos and jeers and arguments rehashed on both sides. The concession stand sold popcorn. They found little common ground.

When the last speaker, Lou Georgiades, walked to the podium, convention center staffers were stacking the chairs.

He summed it up in a sentence: “Nobody’s going to win.”

Emily Foxhall is the Texas Storyteller for the Houston Chronicle. Read her on our free site, chron.com, and on our subscriber site, HoustonChronicle.com. | emily.foxhall@chron.com | Twitter: emfoxhall