The Galveston County Daily News

I will never be able to understand it. How could the Galveston City Council sign off on a plan to use the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program to compensate owners of expensive houses that end up on or near the beach?

In January, the council decided that beach-front homeowners on the West End would be allowed to apply for the money. People who live behind the seawall would not.

Do you know the neighborhoods near Alamo School and between Offatts Bayou and Stewart Road, just west of 61st Street? A lot of the people who are struggling to rebuild those modest houses are working folks.

The city said no to them at the same time it said yes to the people who were wealthy enough to build second and, in some cases, third and fourth homes out on the West End.

I can’t fathom that the federal money was designed to protect the investments of the wealthy and was not designed to help ordinary folks get out of dangerous flood plains.

I’ve lived in Galveston long enough to remember the way the island was before the real-estate boom on the West End.

Those were the days when George Mitchell, who had done a lot to spur development on the island, would greet new folks in town with a little lecture. Mitchell had developed Pirates’ Beach and he would tell how wonderful it was out on the West End — the sun, the sand, the surf.

But he’d also tell people buying into the island with their lives and fortunes — planning to live on the island — that they’d better be able to afford to lose that property out by the beach. If you couldn’t afford to lose it, you’d better stay behind the seawall.

That’s what Galveston was like before the boom.

Consider how things have changed.

Once you use federal money for a buyout, the property can never be developed. It’s permanent green space, permanently off the tax rolls. City officials did not want to see a checkerboard pattern of lots, each too small for a park, behind a seawall.

But they wanted to accommodate those influential folks who owned all that expensive property on the beach. So the cover story for saying yes to one while saying no to the other was that the city just had to buy those West End properties because they would obstruct public access to the beach. They might even interfere with efforts to rebuild the beaches.

Of course, as the council approves those buyouts, you can’t help but notice that a lot of those properties are vacant lots.

Do you understand how vacant lots could obstruct access to the public beach? Do you understand how those vacant lots could present insurmountable problems to engineers trying to put sand on the beach?

I don’t. I don’t think I ever will.

Heber Taylor is editor of The Daily News.