Fort Worth’s Panther Island riverfront project has seen years of delays. What’s next?
Government officials and curious citizens left no seats empty in Fort Worth’s city hall chamber on April 5, 2005.
That day, then-Mayor Mike Moncrief locked horns with skeptical City Council members over the purpose and price of the “Trinity River Vision,” a grand plan to revamp the river’s flood control system and transform a sliver of the waterway twisting around downtown into a haven of urban leisure and recreation.
Fort Worth’s powerful optimists first fleshed out plans for the venture the year before. Moncrief and fellow proponents hailed the undertaking, later rechristened Panther Island, as “the most significant local project since construction of Dallas/Fort Worth airport.”
“Everyone feels the synergy of this project,” Moncrief told the audience in city hall, among them Panther Island champion U.S. Rep. Kay Granger. “They realize this will create a new gateway ... a new face for future generations.”
Doubters weren’t sold on the mayor’s lofty aspirations.
“I think the final cost of the project will be substantially higher” than the original $360 million price tag (around $613 million today), said council member Clyde Picht during the hearing.
The pessimists’ predictions have so far proved prescient. Panther Island has puttered along in fits and starts since its conception. Elusive funding, political squabbles, and the demands of other tasks have blown up deadlines and tested promises.
The project’s budget ballooned to $1.17 billion around 2017 (a figure still listed in project documents today despite inflationary pressures). The most hopeful Panther Island advocates in the early 2000s expected a pocket of high-rises and tree-lined promenades to take form by the end of the decade. No development has happened since.
The Tarrant Regional Water District has yet to acquire 23% of the land within Panther Island’s future boundaries; the body agreed in December to pay a real estate consulting firm $1 million to start thinking up a strategy for selling off land to interested developers.
Much of the new flood control system has yet to be completed. TRWD and the other bodies tasked with bringing Panther Island’s renditions to life predicted in 2018 that every dam, channel and storage pond would be complete by 2028. The project’s latest completion date, as of June, is 2032.
Past delays foreshadowed current ones. It took the Texas Department of Transportation roughly six years and $126.2 million to complete three bridges designed to funnel traffic to and from the island. Construction for the structures, totaling less than a mile in length, began in November 2015, with tentative completion dates set between 2017 and 2018.
“This was a bad deal early on,” Picht said of Panther Island in 2018, a few years before he died. “It’s probably the worst managed public project in the state of Texas, if not the nation.”
Where exactly do things stand today?
▪ The bypass channel: Should Panther Island come to fruition, its three bridges will traverse a 1.5-mile canal designed to redirect swells of floodwater around downtown. A quarterly project report from 2018 predicted construction crews would finish the northern section of the channel by 2024 and the southern half by 2025. Spokespeople for TRWD and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — another organization spearheading the undertaking — said the channel would open in 2028. “Due to design reviews the northern section of the channel design work is scheduled to be completed this year,” they said when asked about the delay; hitches with the northern portion of the channel held up progress farther south.
More hurdles on the horizon?
Few of the latest deadlines are final. Many of Panther Island’s components — the dam, environmental restorations, the floodgates, the southern section of the bypass channel — still need tens of millions of dollars in funding.
When the cash will come is anything but certain. The first Trump administration viewed the undertaking with far more skepticism than enthusiasm, unleashing only $7.5 million of the $526 million in federal funds allotted by Congress for the project.
If Trump and his allies make good on their pledges to drastically slash government spending during his second stint in office, progress on Panther Island may once again sit trapped behind the floodgates.
