Discovery Street Faces a Concrete Future : Urbanization: San Marcos may turn riparian habitat studied by schoolchildren into flood control channel.

Sesame Street, move over. Sixty San Marcos youngsters have something better than the popular children’s television show. They have Discovery Street.

The aptly named avenue meanders along a natural stream where the second-graders from San Marcos Elementary School can find their own Big Bird--a great blue heron--and can watch the real world of plants, bugs, birds and animals progressing through the seasons.

The youngsters, under the watchful eye of parent aides and teacher Kathleen Lindemann, first visited Discovery Street in January, then returned Thursday and will visit again in June, thanks to grants from the Buena Vista Audubon Society and the San Marcos Educational Foundation.

But, before these youngsters become teen-agers, and perhaps long before that, this natural classroom might be lost. City leaders, intent on bringing the sometimes unruly stream under control so that hundreds of acres of vacant land in the center of the city can be developed into a downtown, are proposing a massive flood control project for San Marcos Creek.

The city’s plan calls for retaining a 1.5-mile stretch of the stream bed in its natural state, with enhancements to spruce up its homelier parts so it can reign as a watery centerpiece for the future shopping malls along its edge. But the westernmost stretch of the creek--before it crosses under San Marcos Boulevard, across a golf course and into Lake San Marcos--will become a deep, concrete-lined channel. That is where the students now learn about nature.

January’s trek to Discovery Street yielded sightings of several birds, including a snowy egret, the footprints of several other creekside inhabitants, and “lots and lots of mud,” 7-year-old Armando recited.

Lindemann confirmed that the January visits had netted several mud-cast trophies including raccoon tracks, the prints of an egret and heron, a questionable coot track and one unidentified footprint.

Thursday’s foray added duck down, a ladybug later freed, the remains of a red-winged blackbird that probably succumbed to a fox, and bouquets of wild radish blooms and aromatic anise fronds. By May, Lindemann predicted, the bullfrogs will be croaking love songs, ducklings will be trailing after their mothers, and the turtles will be out after their winter’s beauty sleep.

“It’s a shame that this reach of the creek won’t be saved,” the teacher said, frowning at the thought. “It’s a wonderful place, and it’s a shame to lose it.”

San Marcos Councilman Mark Loscher created the San Marcos Waterways Task Force three years ago to try to find a middle road between “the folks who want the creek to remain just as it has been for decades” and the businessmen “who want to bury the whole creek below ground.” A previous City Council already had approved a plan to pave the entire length of the creek through the city before Loscher’s task force began its search for a better way.

He thinks that the task force has found the solution, or at least the best compromise to a longstanding dispute between the two extremes.

“Portions of the creek will be kept in its natural state and enhanced; portions will be channelized, and a small segment will be in a box culvert (underground),” Loscher said.

The Army Corps of Engineers requires the city to replace as much of the riparian habitat as it destroys, he said. As a part of the project, the city will attempt to turn a 70-acre portion of creekside property near North Twin Oaks Valley Road into riparian habitat. The Discovery Street nature haunt will be transplanted, miles away.

“When I first started in on this, I envisioned developing a waterway that looked and felt like San Antonio’s River Walk, with boats going up and down from one end to the other and shopping along the edges. But now I know that can’t happen,” Loscher said. “It would have had sort of a romantic feeling.”

But federal and state environmental guidelines prohibit the city from destroying all the riparian habitat along the creek, as it would if the city turned one segment into a river backdrop and the other into a concrete channel.

“It’s ironic that, when this plan was first formulated about 15 years ago, it would have cost $2 million to $3 million to build the whole thing,” Loscher said. Now the price tag for taming 5.6 miles of San Marcos Creek and meeting the myriad of federal, state and local requirements is estimated at $90 million to $100 million, and may go higher before the work gets under way, Loscher said.

Loscher held out little hope for the schoolchildren’s stretch of the creek along Discovery Street between McMahr Road and San Marcos Boulevard. If left in its natural state, the area would be subject to severe flood damage if the 100-year flood comes, he said.

“I’m not one who would play guessing games about whether the big flood will come or not. It came in 1914 and put the whole town under water. If it should come now, along that stretch it would destroy two mobile home parks and the church along there. We can’t go risking people’s lives,” Loscher said.

“If people don’t believe that 100-year floods happen, just remember the death and destruction that happened recently in Los Angeles and Ventura. Those were 100-year floods, and they could happen here.”

Jack Neu, a 15-year resident of a creekside mobile home park on Discovery, doesn’t buy Loscher’s argument. If the natural development of the creek channel is safe enough for the 1.5-mile upstream stretch of the creek, he figures, there is no reason that it would not be safe for the short stretch in front of his home.

“I’d like to see them develop this as a park, with an equestrian trail running through it,” Neu said. The meadow where the second-graders hunt for birds and bugs often goes underwater, he said, “when the culvert under the bridge gets jammed up downstream,” and waters rise to within a few feet of his home and garden. Fix the culvert and the water would drain away harmlessly onto the golf course, Neu said.

The 82-year-old regales the second-graders with stories of the past, when he caught 5-pound catfish in the creek and sometimes carp “that weighed 10, 12 pounds.” He shows them where he’s spotted a green-backed heron more recently, where the crayfish hide along the muddy bank, where the fox and otters come and where “those big Canadian honkers” stop to rest.

“There are a number of us here that plan to fight to save the creek,” Neu said. “They just want to put it in a concrete ditch so they can build a bunch of apartment buildings right up to the edge.”

Loscher expects a lot of opposition when the flood control project goes before the city Planning Commission, probably in April, and then on to the City Council. Once the entire project has been approved, developers along the creek can go forward without further environmental permits from the dozens of regulatory agencies outside the city, he said.

“I think that, when the downtown reach is completed, and people see how it is, everyone will agree that we took the best plan possible,” Loscher said.