Jack Christie Candidate for Houston City Council, Supports Disc Golf
 

1. Do you support disc golf?
Christie’s Response: Yes


2. Do you support the use of City of Houston park land for disc golf?
Christie’s Response: Yes


3. Are you aware that disc golf is environmentally friendly?
Christie’s Response: Yes


4. Are you aware that Houston, Texas hosted the 2002 Disc Golf World Championships?
Christie’s Response: No


5. Do you support the use of private donations to improve, expand and install disc golf courses on City of Houston park land?
Christie’s Response: Yes


6. Do you support the use of public funds to improve, expand and install disc golf courses on City of Houston park land?
Christie’s Response: No


7. Are you aware that disc golf is a family friendly sport that offers a high benefit-to-cost ratio both for recreation departments and citizens of all ages and backgrounds and that playing an 18 hole round of disc golf requires walking for approximately 1 and 1/2 hours and burns approximately 700 calories through low-impact aerobic activity?
Christie’s Response: Cool


8. Are you aware that disc golf has grown at the rate of 10% per year for the past 20 years?
Christie’s Response: I am now


9. What can you do to promote the interests of disc golf in the Houston, Texas area?
Christie’s Response: Listen to You’ll


10. Why should the disc golf community in Houston, Texas support your election campaign?
Christie’s Response: Because I am an outdoor enthusiast for exercise and entertainment for over 40 years

Re: Jack Christie Candidate for Houston City Council, Supports Disc Golf
 

Great work Richard

Re: Jack Christie Candidate for Houston City Council, Supports Disc Golf
 

Thanks, Derek. Dr. Christie supports disc golf even if he does not support use of public funds to improve, install and expand disc golf courses on public property. As you are aware what we are primarily seeking is use of the public park land space as we can raise private donations to pay for the course installations, expansions and improvements.

Re: Jack Christie Candidate for Houston City Council, Supports Disc Golf
 

So how does the "power" heirarchy work for the parks Richard? I mean...we see these candidates who state that they are in support of Disc Golf, but in the end, it seems like we are still left having to deal with the same old HPARD folks that move very slowly and not with the candidates whom we might vote for.

By what mechanism can a candidate that we vote for affect some positive change for us? The Parks dept. folks aren't elected are they? I'm presuming that if they aren't elected then someone somewhere hires them, and once hired are they in HPARD for life then?

Re: Jack Christie Candidate for Houston City Council, Supports Disc Golf
 

Good question, Larry. The Parks and Recreation people are mostly in favor of disc golf. I believe that we have their support. However, not everyone in HPARD is a supporter of disc golf. We got their attention with the work days last year at Mozola when we had more than 35 people show up for two work days. The areas that we cleaned in the Buffalo Bayou Park still look good. Parks & Rec. designated a liason for disc golf, something we did not have before. As Louis Moore of HPARD said at the HFDS meeting in March, the city would like to know how many people play disc golf, which is why I started the petition drive, primarily to show some numbers.

In my opinion, City council and the mayor's office can have influence on planning commission appointments, hires at HPARD as well as expenditures. Yes, while civil servants have longitude in their job security, the policy is usually set at the top of the bureaucracy. The plan is to follow the path that others have followed like those that wanted to to save the sports fields at Memorial Park. They signed petitions. They approached city council members and the Mayor's office in a professional manner. They sought to communicate their wishes to HPARD. We can do the same thing. The more that the attention level about disc golf can be raised with regard to the city government, the better for disc golf. The desires of HPARD is different from City Council and The Mayor's office. HPARD want to be able to provide the greatest amount of recreation and multi-use bang for the buck and to show accomplishments of increased recreation in the parks system. City Council and the Mayor's office wants to be able to point to accomplishments and in these economic times success in bringing revenues to Houston with little cost. One accomplishment, the disc golf offers is improved economic impact for Houston like bringing tourist dollars from events like Texas States, Worlds, or even if we had more tournaments which could bring more people to Houston to play disc golf.

Re: Jack Christie Candidate for Houston City Council, Supports Disc Golf
 

Hmmm...you've provided a lot of information to digest. Thanks.

* * * *

So, maybe one other thing we might be able to do in addition to your petition would be to conduct a census-like survey at each of the major courses around town.

Back when we did the Moffitt Tee Box project, I spent a 24-hour period out at Moffitt just recording each different player's name and zip code just to get a count. I started the survey at noon on Thursday and finished it at noon on Friday. I think that I obtained about 140 signatures in that 24-hours period at Moffitt.

Do you think that we might be able to organize our own "census-taking" inventory at each of the most played courses? I bet that information would be of great value to HPARD which also makes it of great value to us!!! Would it be worth trying to organize something?

You know, annually there is a sort-of nationwide series of events called "World's Biggest" where every club is supposed to get a bunch of newbies out to some low entry fee kind of fun tournament. I think we send a report somewhere to document how many folks each club gets to turn out... I'm thinking that maybe a BIG push for something like that with HPARD's backing might be taking advantage of an already existing gig to see how many folks we can get to come out and be counted.

Re: Jack Christie Candidate for Houston City Council, Supports Disc Golf
 

Ching, those are all great ideas!:cool: The Waterloo Club in Austin is doing a similar thing. It would require a significant number of volunteers. Seems to me that you would want to put volunteers at the 4 courses on HPARD land that are regularly played (Moffitt, Mozola, MacGregor and T. C. Jester), perhaps on 4 consecutive Saturdays and Sundays. Thus I estimate the time for census takers to be approximately 200 hours.

Volunteers would need to provide the leadership, to coordinate the effort, to create a survey, to create a schedule, to seek volunteers to fill time slots on the schedule, to manage the surveys, to compile the data from the surveys and to present the data to HPARD. This is likely to be another 40-60 hours of diligent work.

Plenty of people are willing to express their opinions on this message board, yet it is the same half dozen or so people that I see attending the HFDS meetings. :confused: It would be great if there were additional people willing to step-up and do the hard-work to run such a coordinated effort. The half dozen or so people that regularly attend the HFDS meetings have currently already committed a significant amount of their time volunteering for other disc golf projects. As I stated at the last HFDS club meeting, asking this same core element of volunteers to add yet another project to their disc golf volunteer activities may be onerous and overly burdensome, leading to burnout. :eek: If more people came to the HFDS meetings to be active in volunteering on projects like this, the greater the likelihood of such a project occurring. Could be that before the quality of the disc golf courses in Houston will have much growth, the number of volunteers willing to do the work necessary will have to grow first.

Should we conduct a poll on this message board to see how many volunteers would be willing to commit to spending time on such a project? Perhaps this will create a snowball effect and inspire people to step-up. Perhaps this message board could be a vehicle for organizing this effort in lieu of people actually attending an HFDS meeting. Your thoughts?

Re: Jack Christie Candidate for Houston City Council, Supports Disc Golf
 

I know that I would be willing to help with this initiative. We should move this too a new thread though. Jack Christie is getting a good bit of publicity out of it :)