As growth consumes the Texas prairie, Fort Worth considers a plan to slow sprawl
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to correct a neighborhood name.
Each year, Fort Worth developers are turning 2,800 acres of Texas prairie into housing divisions, strip malls and warehouses.
That’s equal to about 2,100 football fields.
While the growth is good for Fort Worth, it’s not great for the air and water quality in North Texas or its natural habitats. Fort Worth is growing by about 20,000 people a year, and to lessen the effect on the environment, city planners have pitched a partnership with the Trust for Public Lands, a nonprofit that advocates for public open space and helps cities develop park plans. The effort will identify high priority property still in a relatively natural state that may be worth maintaining, if the City Council gives the OK.
“To me, protecting open space is about future generations,” said City Manager David Cooke.
The idea came as welcome news to Wanda Conlin, who has advocated for more public space “probably for decades,” she said.
Specifically, she and neighbors in the Scenery Hill section of West Meadowbrook are worried about Broadcast Hill. NBC Universal deeded more than 26 acres to the city when KXAS/Channel 5 moved from its location on the hill, but dozens of acres to the east remain privately owned, mostly by oil and gas company Total E&P USA Inc.
The city created the Tandy Hill Natural Area, but Conlin wants the entire hill protected by the city, she said, calling it an “environmental treasure.”
“In the spring it’s just breathtaking with all the wildflowers,” she said. “Those of us who live over here are very protective of it and we don’t want to see it developed.”
The city hasn’t named specific properties, in order to not drive up prices, but Jennifer Dyke, a stormwater manager who has led the conservation effort, said properties like Broadcast Hill might meet the criteria for protection.
“We don’t want to end up, you know, owning everything,” Dyke said. “We want those key, most important pieces.”
To get an idea of where there is still undeveloped land worth protecting, the Trust for Public Land plans to examine data like flood plain and land use maps, said Robert Kent, the nonprofit’s North Texas director. The trust will build a website where the public can see possible zones worth protecting, weighed against how the open land would benefit public health, mitigate flooding, improve water quality and spur economic development. Cost of the land and its ecosystem preservation will also be factors.
Identifying those areas could cost Fort Worth about $360,000, less than what Dallas spent on a similar initiative that finished last year. Dallas purchased around 40 acres of land for new parks and developed a long term plan for protecting the Five Mile Creek watershed, Kent said.
Now is the time to find and preserve land, said Stacy Pierce, executive director of Streams and Valleys. Development is quickly eating up natural or semi-natural areas, potentially damaging tributaries of the Trinity River.
“If we follow through with this, we can create a respite from the hustle and bustle,” she said. “Besides, it’s much cheaper in the end than cleaning up what we mess up.”
Ideally, people should live within a 10 minute walk of some kind of park or open space, Kent said. With 60% of residents living close to parks, Fort Worth is behind Dallas at 69%, Plano at 75% and Grapevine at 70%, but ahead of Arlington, where 57% live within a 10 minute walk of a park.
Fort Worth is also doing better than similarly sized cities across the country. Less than 40% of residents in Charlotte, North Carolina, Jacksonville, Florida and Indianapolis live near open space, according to a Trust for Public Land assessment.
“Fort Worth has a little bit of catching up to do, but that’s why we think it’s so important to do this now,” Kent said.
City Council
It’s unclear how much the city is willing to spend on public land, but Dyke said it hopes to work with nonprofit partners, like Streams and Valleys. Funding for park and open space could be built into the 2022 bond proposal, come from the city’s oil and gas revenue or be included in other budgets.
Council members largely greeted the idea with excitement when briefed last week. They’ll be asked to vote on the partnership with the Trust for Public Lands at an upcoming meeting.
Gyna Bivens, who represents the area around Lake Arlington, welcomed protecting more land and said city staff may be surprised by how much is available. She said the lake is an asset to economic development but needed to be protected from “negligent property owners.”
Abundant outdoor space has been a hallmark of the city, said Councilman Brian Byrd, who said the city needs to be forward-thinking about land.
“My sense is the people who come behind us 50 years from now, if we’re deliberate like this with our space, will be very thankful,” Byrd said.
But there is some skepticism.
Councilman Cary Moon wasn’t sure the city had done enough with its current park space.
“Show us what y’all can do with what we already have,” Moon said during the briefing. “(That) would be a good place to start.”
Former Councilwoman Becky Haskin advocated for parks when she served from 1993 to 2006. Back then, Fort Worth’s sprawl barely reached Denton County, but the city was in a “huge annexing frenzy,” she said.
Often the city relied on developers to set aside land for open space, but the parcels frequently weren’t cohesive or easy to use as park space.
She agreed that the sooner the city formed an open space plan, the better. But she remained doubtful.
“The city is always behind the eight-ball,” she said. “There are so many parks now that don’t meet the needs of the community.”
Walsh Ranch to Lake Arlington
Three general areas have already risen to the top.
One is the west shore of Lake Arlington. Eugene McCray Park takes up a tiny sliver, but Dyke said acquiring a buffer along the shoreline would protect the lake from pollution, provide walking and biking trails and potentially benefit stormwater drainage from the east Fort Worth neighborhoods nearby.
Sycamore Creek runs through the central part of the city before emptying into the Trinity River. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has tasked the city with cleaning the water closest to the river because of high levels of bacteria in the water.
Linking four parks along the creek, Hallmark, Carter, Cobb and Sycamore, with creek-side trails would prevent some pollution from washing into the creek, Dyke said. A trail system would also connect southeast Fort Worth neighborhoods to the city center and open up a large strip of public land in a part of town where the majority of residents are black or Hispanic.
On the far west side of town, parts of the Mary’s Creek watershed is also worth preserving, Dyke said. The Walsh development will be home to about 50,000 people across roughly 7,000 acres, so the city should look into buying up part of the flood plain now, she said. The increased development will worsen rain runoff into the creek, potentially causing flooding downstream in the Trinity River. Preserved natural land may act as a sponge for that water, she said.
This story was originally published December 9, 2019 at 6:00 AM.
