Who speaks for the trees in downtown Fort Worth? A fight over foliage shows a deeper divide
There’s a fight going on over the look and feel of downtown Fort Worth.
Its latest iteration is a dispute over trees.
Sundance Square is a privately owned 35-square-block downtown business and entertainment district owned exclusively by Ed and Sasha C. Bass for the past two and a half years. The Bass family started developing the area in the 1970s, but Ed and Sasha took over full ownership of the district in fall 2019.
For the past 20 years Sundance has had what it calls an “informal agreement” with the city to care for the trees next to its property.
That changed in January, when an advisory board for a special downtown taxing district called a Public Improvement District dissolved the agreement, giving exclusive rights to manage the trees to the nonprofit business advocacy organization Downtown Fort Worth Inc.
Downtown Fort Worth Inc. has contracted with the city since 1986 to manage the taxing district. This empowers the nonprofit to manage the maintenance of the city property downtown.
“They’ve been trying to screw with Sundance on this issue for the last two and a half years,” said Bryan Eppstein, a spokesperson for Sundance Square management.
He pointed to a litany of problems between Sundance and Downtown Fort Worth Inc., from COVID-19 precautions to the running of the annual Main Street Arts Festival.
Andy Taft, who’s been president of Downtown Fort Worth Inc. for the past 18 years, wrote in an email to the Star-Telegram that he was not aware of any disagreements between the two groups until the tree dispute flared up last year.
COVID recovery
Eppstein singled out Taft, saying that Taft blamed Sundance Square’s closure of the plaza for downtown’s slow recovery from the pandemic.
“He even created a sham committee to try to force the reopening of the plaza,” Eppstein said.
Taft responded that the committee was a downtown reopening task force aimed at helping the area transition out of the pandemic. He said he and several members of the task force asked Sundance Square management to reopen the plaza to help generate interest in downtown.
“The closure of Sundance Square sent a bad signal especially when similar areas like the Stockyards and Clearfork reopened quicker,” Taft said. He denied placing all the blame on Sundance Square’s management.
Eppstein rejected the comparisons to Clearfork and the Stockyards. He said downtown has unique challenges, including the loss of traffic from office workers.
Mike Micallef, president of Reata restaurant, blamed some of the slow recovery on Sundance.
“We all were faced with the pandemic, so I think you have to make that comparison,” Micaleff said.
Micaleff also took issue with a recent assertion by Sundance that restaurants had a record year in 2021. He shared a graph on Instagram showing his business was significantly down in 2021 compared to 2019.
In July 2021 the Star-Telegram found about a third of Sundance Square’s storefronts were empty; however, that percentage was in line with other major metros, according to an analysis by Bill Fulton, director of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.
The Arts Festival
The Main Street Fort Worth Arts Festival, programmed by Downtown Fort Worth Inc., runs annually downtown from the courthouse to the convention center. Sundance Square Plaza, which sits in the middle of the festival footprint, has traditionally hosted artist and vendor booths as part of the event.
However, this year Sundance will be programming its own festival because of a disagreement with Downtown Fort Worth Inc. over how many local artists participate in the Main Street festival.
Only 5% of the artists in the Main Street Fort Worth Arts Festival are from Fort Worth, Eppstein said.
Promoting local artists is not really what the event was intended to do, said Jay Downie, events director for Downtown Fort Worth Inc. Its purpose is to bring world-class artists to Fort Worth.
The Main Street festival is a juried festival where more than a thousand artists from across the country compete for 200 slots. Fort Worth artists do submit work to be considered for the festival, but participation is overwhelmingly made up of artists from outside the region.
Downtown Fort Worth Inc. has been in discussions with Sundance for about a year to try to find a way to include more local artist participation, while maintaining the integrity of festival’s jury process, Downie said.
“Despite multiple attempts to offer compromises and our willingness to pay the full quoted rental fee for the plaza, they refuse to rent it to us unless we admit their handpicked visual artists without going through our jury process,” he said.
The Fort Worth Art Fair put on by Sundance will exclusively feature artists from Fort Worth and North Texas, Eppstein said. It will also feature a slate of performances programmed by Grammy Award-winning recording artist and Fort Worth native Leon Bridges.
Downie said his goal is to create a seamless experience for festival-goers. Both Main Street and Sundance’s Fort Worth Art Fair will run downtown April 7-10.
The trees
The problem with the trees began in mid-2021, Taft wrote.
According to Taft, Sundance did not put any plants in its tree beds between February 2021 and October 2021. Under the informal agreement, Sundance was responsible for taking care of shrubbery in the planters.
That did not happen despite Sundance being urged to do so numerous times, Taft wrote.
Eppstein explained the reasoning behind the delay was to work out a deal with Downtown Fort Worth Inc. over a different kind of planting for the downtown tree beds.
Sundance hired a certified arborist, who advised switching from annual to perennial plants to help with soil health and save money. The arborist also reported some of the twinkle lights were strangulating downtown trees and impeding their growth, Eppstein said.
Using this advice, Sundance crews unplugged or removed lights in several downtown trees, Taft said.
However, under the informal agreement, Downtown Fort Worth Inc. was responsible for tree lighting, and needed to be consulted before any lights were unplugged or removed, Taft said.
This led to a Nov. 4 meeting with District 9 council member Elizabeth Beck, who told both groups they needed to either throw out the informal agreement or put any future agreements in writing.
Sundance Square drew up a proposal to formalize the agreement, but it was rejected at a Jan. 12 meeting of the downtown advisory board.
Lawyers for Sundance Square have appealed to the deputy city attorney Laetitia Coleman Brown over the Public Improvement District board’s decision to throw out the informal agreement. However, the formal appeals process involves Sundance appealing directly to Downtown Fort Worth Inc. as manager of the PID district.
Eppstein said the owners of Sundance Square have notified the city they refused to deal with the group while Taft is in charge.
He called the PID board meeting an ambush, and said Sundance had exposed Downtown Fort Worth Inc.’s poor maintenance of downtown trees.
Sundance took to social media to share a video of its arborist explaining the problems with some of the trees strangled by lights and metal tree grates.
“Constructive criticism is always welcome, but I would point to the health of the trees as evidence to the contrary,” Taft wrote. He pointed to a July 2021 tree survey conducted by Downtown Fort Worth Inc. that showed only two trees in the downtown core were “in need of attention.”
A Star-Telegram review of Downtown Fort Worth Inc.’s study showed 55% of trees were in “fair” condition, 41% were “stressed” and less than 2% were in poor condition requiring removal.
This story was originally published February 15, 2022 at 5:20 AM.
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