Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, September 21, 2010,
Item 8
>> number 8 is receive briefing and take appropriate action regarding neighborhood fishing program.
>> judge, this is a fund for something that we do, but before we get started, we allow everyone to have a seat, and before they start their particular presentation, y'all get comfortable. I'd like to ask media, could you run that little version of the tape, the video, media, and after that then they will go ahead and proceed.
>> are you all ready? Ready? For the man. All right.
>> there they go.
>> now, that's -- that's making believers out of folks that suggested that --
>> there's no fish out there in bull creek. Pond. But at this time if they don't mind going into this, judge, they will make their presentation. Thank you, judge. Y'all go ahead.
>> good morning, judge and commissioners. It's my pleasure to introduce marcus from the parks and wildlife inland fishery program, and he's been instrumental in getting this program together at east metro park that's been up and successfully running for the last two years. Here's marcus.
>> thank you, good morning, and thank you for having me over today, judge, commissioners. I just want to take a little time here to update out the neighborhood fishing here in travis county and also let the public know there's a good opportunity to see what the program is about. And we're going to have pretty good presentation here, show some optimistic results, so hope you enjoy it. Partnerships is a very important issue when we try to develop these programs and i'm happy to say that the neighborhood fishing program has been running now since 2003, and in travis county since 2008. And it's all thanks to partnerships that work well between travis county parks and recreation, texas parks and wildlife and funding from toyota texas bass classic and sports fishing restoration. With these partnerships we've been able to achieve quite a bit. And like i said, i want to talk a little about neighborhood fishing. It was established in 2003 as a pilot program. And pretty much we want to provide quality year-round recreational fishing activities in major urban areas emphasizing youth and family participation. Successful life and effective partnerships between local governments, volunteers, private entities, and our goal is to increase participation in fishing and outdoor recreation while attracting more urban youth families to public parks. We anticipate many benefits from this program, and some of them are providing you opportunities in urban areas to allow many more people to enjoy wholesome, family oriented fishing opportunities close to home. Recreational activities like fishing tend to increase public awareness of the valley of clean, safe parks and increase support for programs that conserve natural resources and maintain good water quality. We also estimate that for every $16 spent on the neighborhood fishing program, we bring one more person into fishing, which is very important to us. These are our supporters in conservation. So how does this whole operation work? Pretty much -- getting down to the nitty-gritty, it's a nice stocking program we have around our participating lakes, and we supply, we stock fish 10 months out of the year, and it's a constant stocking every two weeks to provide easy, quality fishing opportunities in local neighborhoods. We also want to provide fishing-related information on site and want to make -- have access to basic fishing opportunities, equipment at the sites if possible. Let me show you some statistics from the program. Back in 2006, we ran a pilot evaluation back with our first eighth sites which also wasn't included at this point, as we saw about 30,000 different anglers fished eight pilot sites in one year. Over 50% were new to the sport of fishing. And there was a 2.6 to 1 adult to child ratio, which is very good. And two out of three live within five miles of the site and more than half fish there exclusively. So with this type of success, we -- we decided it was time to expand around texas and we wanted to as part of our objectives to really expand to metropolitan areas that are statistically with over 100,000 inhabitants. And as you see on our map here, austin was included in part of the expansion. We have now 14 sites around the state of texas. Here in austin our site is east metropolitan park managed by travis county parks and recreation out on the east side of town. Joint neighborhood fishing in 2008 and bull frog pond is host for the program. All of them are managed for fishing. Bull frog pond is actually the only one under the program. We couldn't do it without partnerships. Very important to acknowledge travis county parks personnel and the support all the way up from commissioner davis all the way down to charles burg and kurt neilsen, robert, all the way down to robert davis down at the park and his crew which have done an excellent job working with us and keeping this park in excellent shape. And it's a beautiful location. You can see they've put up regulation signs, helped upset up the kiosk, conduct vegetation control to keep access for the anglers. They are really in touch with their parks and take pride in what they do and i want to thank you all for being such a great partner in this. Bull frog pond, as you can see, it's a very beautiful site and this is all result of hard labor and work from the park personnel to keep this an optimal place to go fishing. Let me show you a little bit of the demographics around bull frog pond here. If you look on your screen, you'll see bull frog pond is that red dot all the way on the east side of town. The darker areas represent population densities around the austin metroplex. And the darker the area, the denser the population. Your scale is on your right side. Just to say that white areas are pretty much low density populations. As you see, bull frog pond lays out quite a bit from that. We'll go ahead and show you here, we've provided some 5, 15 and 30-minute drive times around the park and you see that the heavy population is outside of the 30-minute drive to this park. And if you understand the way neighborhood fishing works, we try to have locations that are close by where your population is for your target demographic, and right now it's looking at it, it wouldn't look like it's a prime spot, but i'll show you after some of the studies that we've done that it's actually worked out really well. Within that 15 to 30-minute drive time, you can see the difference in population. 2009 census information shows about 9,000 inhabitants within 15-minute drive of the park. 407,000 within the 30-minute drive. So it's -- it's starting to grow. If you look at your projected five-year growth at 4.4% growth estimated is actually projected for the next five years within a 15-minute drive which shows there is actually -- the people are going to come towards the park and it's going to provide a lot more usage down the road. We've done some marketing and promotion to promote this, and as you can see commissioner davis has played a great role in this. He actually on his own took it to conduct a press release to try to let everyone know that we have a great program in town. And we've also done some newspaper releases, television news spots, radio promotions, internet web links, which like to thank travis county again for allowing us to put a promotional banner on the parks and recreation website which is nice. It's an interactive banner that allows us to link back and forth between parks and wildlife and travis county parks, and that's on your screen quite now. -- right now. We have an on site kiosk providing fishing information and promotions. We've actually put a spot on tpw magazine for the neighborhood fishing program. Recently we're trying to do a short distance promotions with direct mailouts and promotional fliers which are still underway and evaluation. Like i said, it's ongoing. We have an actual digital camera placed on site that's actually recording as we speak and it records fishing participation trends throughout the year. And we also have developed a questionnaire survey to go out there and we go and ask people about the park and how they heard about it. Here's a picture, i also want to thank the road and bridge -- road and bridge travis county is actually providing the trucks and equipment to allow us to deal with the cameras which are placed in a high area. You can see, so thanks to their participation we're actually safely accessing our camera sites. This is what a camera shot looks like just as an example. You can see people participating at bull frog pond and it takes a shot every so often so i could look at participation trends throughout the year which is going to bring us valuable information down the road not only for parks but the way we manage the lake and promote it. So we've evaluated it, and so far we will be continuing evaluating this all the way through next april. So far we've conducted nine surveys. There will be nine more surveys next winter. And our first nine surveys, i just want to show you that we counted 95 adults participating, 41 children, which gives us a 2.3 to one ratio adult to children, which is about -- it's better than the three to one that's part of our
>> [indiscernible] in the program. Out of those 81 people participated in the questionnaire and we found out 22% are new users or new to the park. Here's the figure i wanted you to really see. We were worried about how far out this park was compared to our metropolitan area and population. If you see once again we've brought up this map here. We're showing our 15-30-minute drive times and we have some radius showing the distances. If you look at the blue squares marked all over the map, those represent zip codes that we collected in our questionnaire. We asked people where are you coming from, where do you live. And based on the questionnaire, and the bigger the square the more frequency for the response, you can see people are using this park from all over travis county. They are coming up from williamson county, coming up from hays county, bastrop county so the program is popular and people are traveling 20 miles average one way to get to this park just to participate. In neighborhood fishing. Here's one you might be very interested in we also asked them how likely are you to return to fish at bull frog pond. 76 or 93% actually say they are highly likely to return, which is the highest score on a one to five scale. And we also got three likelys and two neutrals and there were no unlikelys to report. So pretty much 100% or close to 100% satisfaction. For the program. And if you ever have the chance to go out there, you could talk to people and they really enjoy the program. So many people are participating at bull frog pond and participants are willing to traveling long distances, 20 miles, 30 miles to participate. Our objectives are being met in higher angler satisfactions -- high angler satisfaction is being recorded based on this program. And it's all thanks to great partnership that we have with travis county. And i'm going to show you what travis county is actually getting for -- for their investment. In 2006 on that pilot study, i realize had some 30,000 different anglers participating at eight pilot lakes, an average 3750 anglers per lake. With proper marketing, it's estimated those numbers could double. That's what we're doing here and we're hopefully going to reach those numbers or even higher. The average annual cost to run this program at one location ranges twice $25,000 and $35,000. Some are way higher than that depending on their location. In our case here, we're right closer to the $25,000 a year. Travis county parks and recreation department actually puts in about 1200, a little under $1,300 as a participation fee to get this program running. That's about -- that really covers the rainbow trout purchases, which we don't produce in the state so we have to purchase them from out of state. These fish actually cost $2.63 a fish. Travis county is paying 1 on .43, which is an incredible deal. Like on $1,300, you are providing a lot of recreation, a lot of opportunities for people in travis county. Even outside the county. The remaining cost is covered by tpwd and this doesn't include also some promotional items that we're constantly doing. We really want to promote this program. We want it to succeed all through texas and travis county has been a great steward and actually we're conducting some state-of-the-art, you know, evaluations here that are going to be probably ground setting for other -- other areas to actually perform and try to see participation and growth. So i'm really happy with your partnership and really want to ask you to always keep news mind. We're looking to expanding within austin itself and the austin area and travis county, and we've heard that there is some parks and recreation would like to expand to other lakes and maybe down the road when we're ready to do so we have the support and continue to serve the people of travis county which are really benefiting from this program. Thank you. Any questions?
>> so what kind of fish do we use to stock the pond.
>> channel cat in the summertime and rainbow trout in the wintertime. We do trout through november through march and then april through october we do the channel catfish. Every two weeks.
>> so do we think the time will come when the pond will basically sustain itself?
>> no, it's not designed to sustain itself. It's actually what we call a catch and keep program. And it's a -- we want people to go out there and harvest fish. Because at the rate we're stocking them, it wouldn't be feasible if people were to release them, it wouldn't hold itself. We need people to harvest, we need people to come and enjoy the fishing experience. And we really, you know, we just ask them to keep fish and we'll continue to stock.
>> they get --
>> some members of this court when they see $1.50, they think of h.e.b. And so if you are stocking indefinitely --
>> judge, we pay for the rainbow trout in three months of the winter, but all summer all the catfish, we don't cover the cost for the catfish at parks and wildlife, the state does. It's a fairly cheap investment at $1,300. And we thank you for it too.
>> it's a fabulous program. Do you have to have a fishing license?
>> yes, fishing license is required.
>> he made a good point, but it's five per day that you can keep. And that's on the rainbow trout and also the catfish. And as he stated, it is a harvesting effort, but the larger picture is it's able to bring families together and especially those particular parents that take their children out and allow them to get a fishing experience. It's a pretty big deal and the texas parks and wildlife folks are doing a tremendous job with this particular neighborhood fishing program and i'm really excited that travis county is a part of it, and it's very minimal cost to operate such a function. I guess at one point folks had started timing exactly when you were going to arrive to release the fish. They would be waiting in line and stuff like that, see you coming down the road and everyone line up. Have you made any type of delivers where folks won't be just waiting -- just basically just waiting there as you release the fish into the pond? How have you overcome that or have you?
>> well, i don't know if overcoming it is the word, but it's almost like people develop a biological clock. You know when you are hungry. They know when the truck shows up. For this program we actually don't promote the stocking days. We just know that it's every -- the hatchery plays a big role in when they can stock these fish. Whenever the fish are ready -- or priority is to make sure the fish are prime for stocking. Make sure the conditions are right. If there's something unsafe for the fish or people stocking we might move it on a certain day. It's going to be sometime during that week and they know that so they kind of hover around the days -- like i said, they develop -- and that's fine, that's fine. But the actual program is designed with frequent stock goes to provide a quality fishing opportunity any time you go. Of course, in texas it's very popular because we do have so many other stocking programs and people love to follow, you know, the truck and be there right there, be the first ones. So it's kind of a mentality thing, but the way the program is designed, we're hoping that if you go on any day that's not a stocking day, you will be able to catch fish. Like you said, commissioner, it's really about bringing families and introducing children to fishing. They are the future and conservation in this state and this program is designed to bring these people in to understand how important our resources are, and these are the people who are going to invest in conserving the state and it's working well.
>> thank you.
>> thank you very much for joining us.
>> thank you for having us.
>> thank you for the presentation. Thank you very much.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Tuesday, September 21, 2010 7:57 PM
