Public Notice: Hancock Golf Park, Take 3

The Hancock Golf Course/Park story continues to take unexpected turns, continuing to revolve more around what's not happening, than what is. The city Parks and Recreation Department's Golf Division has been wanting to do something with this underperforming nine-hole course-cum-de-facto-public-park for years now. In the continuation of a process interrupted by the pandemic, PARD announced a pair of civic engagement meetings a couple of weeks ago, to be held this week, to present earlier public feedback on its plans, along with a request for proposals to create a public-private partnership to develop and run a "modern golf learning center" on the site.

But before they could get to that, the Hancock Neigh­bor­hood Association's parks committee had a resolution to present to the NA's meeting last week, which called for splitting the property between golf and parkland.

But before they could get to that, a grassroots Hancock Conservancy organization was announced, in the works for a while now and dedicated to turning the entire property into a public park. Just days after announcing their existence, they pitched that alternate plan at last Wednesday's Hancock NA meeting, whereupon the plan from the NA's own parks committee was voted down ("soundly," I'm told). Though the Conservancy was unable to present their own resolution at this meeting for procedural reasons, they're expected to do so in time for the next NA meeting.

Meanwhile, PARD's meetings were still scheduled for Monday and Thursday of this week; but on Monday afternoon, in a flurry of emails from the department and the city public info office just hours before the meeting was to start, PARD canceled them, "in order to fully adhere to the City of Austin Public Participation Principles," because there were so many people now registered to participate, that it would "significantly limit dialogue opportunities for attendees in the online format." PARD promised to reschedule "additional options for participation, focusing on small group meetings." They'll "reach out to neighborhood and community groups to schedule online meetings," and "groups may also send meeting requests to [email protected]. All meetings will be recorded and posted to the project's website."

So that's where we are as we go to press this week. Stay tuned.

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This is the last week for the Texas Film Round-Up, a program of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, offering free digitization for the month of October for any Texas-related films and videotapes, in exchange for contributing a digital copy of the materials to TAMI's online archive. See www.texasarchive.org/round-up for info.

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Save time voting: See the Travis County Clerk's map of current wait times at each of the 36 early voting polling places (open through Oct. 30) at countyclerk.traviscountytx.gov/elections/wait-time-map.html.