By Carolyn Chipman Evans
Guest Columnist

Monetary figures don’t begin to describe the gift of the nature center: a peaceful, fresh-air park for all to enjoy, a place to learn how to steward your land and water resources, a spot to see hummingbirds and hawks, cypress trees and fish, the young couple walking hand in hand, the kids fishing, the class of students with their teacher, the Eagle Scouts at work, the mother with a baby carriage, the joggers, the older couple helping each other down the trail — priceless.

Every third and fifth grader in the Boerne Independent School District experiences the outdoor classroom at the Cibolo Nature Center. So do thousand of students from other districts. Property owners learn how to harvest rain and manage their land. Researchers test the water and investigate management practices. What does it take to run a nature center?

The CNC has built a $2 million educational facility in City Park at no expense to taxpayers, and has purchased the Herff/Rozelle Farm: 56 acres of adjoining parkland with natural and historic treasures for $2.3 million at no expense to taxpayers.

The additional restorations and improvements at the farm will eventually total over $4.7 million. Several years ago the CNC independently procured 27 acres along the Cibolo Corridor for protected land valued at approximately $1 million, at no expense to taxpayers.

That adds up to about $10 million of parkland and facilities for Boerne, thanks to the CNC. Twenty years of staff and teacher salaries have been provided. At this point it would cost the city of Boerne $1 million a year to operate the nature center without the monetary and volunteer support that the Cibolo Nature Center provides.

Does this sound like a good deal to other towns? Four thousand copies of our “Nature Center Book,” about how to create a nature center, have sold all over America, because other towns want to learn how to do what we have done here.

Boerne taxpayers have recently voted to purchase even more parkland in both city and county bond elections. Does anyone seriously think that the public would vote to spend tax dollars on more parkland, and then want the city to turn the recently purchased parkland at the Herff/Rozelle Farm into a wastewater treatment plant? Next to the nature center?

In 20 years we will obviously have a sewage plant – but what about our treasures? Treasures that have been given to the community – will we hold on to them?

All considered, the Cibolo Nature Center has provided, through a cooperative effort with the city of Boerne, a publicly available, award-winning park, educational resource, and research facility, a park that will be situated in the center of our growing town and will be appreciated by many generations to come.

Evans is executive director of the Cibolo Nature Center.