Texas Gov. Abbott weighs in on fight to keep Fairfield Lake State Park from development
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has offered support for preserving Fairfield Lake State Park, which is scheduled to close within days as a private developer moves forward with purchasing the land.
The 1,800-acre park between the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston is at the center of a saga about land rights and public access to the outdoors.
The state has leased the land for the park for nearly 50 years. The landowner intends to sell the park to a private developer who wants to build multimillion-dollar homes in a gated community along the lake.
But residents and lawmakers haven’t given up on the state park. One day after the private owner formally terminated the state park lease, a Texas lawmaker filed a bill that would allow the state to take the park land through eminent domain.
Abbott, in a Thursday interview with the Star-Telegram, didn’t specifically address the possibility of eminent domain. But he said he wants to see the park remain public.
“We’re working with Texas Parks and Wildlife on doing everything we can to preserve that park,” Abbott said.
His office declined to elaborate Friday.
The governor has spoken generally about the need to protect and grow parkland as businesses move into the state and its population grows, including during a Feb. 8 event celebrating 100 years of Texas parks.
Texans and people moving to the state “need to be good conservationists,” Abbott said.
“Yes, we want people to come here,” he said. “Yes, we want Texas to grow. Yes, we want Texas to prosper. But we can do that while at the very same time conserving the beautiful parks that we have and adding to them to make Texas even more appealing to future generations.”
Environment Texas responded Friday to Abbott’s comments to the Star-Telegram by urging lawmakers to act. The advocacy group said its supporters are going to the Texas Capitol at noon Tuesday. “The fight isn’t over yet,” executive director Luke Metzger said in a statement.
Since the 1970s, the state has leased the Fairfield Lake land from Vistra Corp., an energy company that used to operate a power plant nearby.
When Vistra, through subsidiary Luminant, shuttered the plant in 2018, it notified the state that it was moving toward selling its entire 5,000-acre property, which included the park. The state didn’t buy the property then, and Parks and Wildlife officials have said the department simply didn’t have the money at the time.
Vistra listed the property in 2021 for $110 million. It was advertised as a development opportunity and as the “largest private water offering in the state of Texas.”
Parks and Wildlife officials, including the chair of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, Arch “Beaver” Aplin III, have said that the state did ask Vistra if it could purchase just the park property. Vistra wasn’t interested in selling only a portion of its 5,000 acres.
But another buyer was interested in the full property. Vistra entered into a sale contract with Todd Interests, a Dallas-based company that has headed up projects including the Dallas’ East Quarter development.
Todd Interests made clear to the state that it had no plans to continue the state park lease once it purchased the property – particularly because the development firm plans to transform the property into a gated community of multi-million dollar homes.
As the park’s fate became increasingly in jeopardy, Texas Parks and Wildlife officials began sounding the alarm publicly. In a late January interview with the Star-Telegram, Aplin and Parks and Wildlife Department executive director David Yoskowitz said the state was prepared to purchase the full property to keep the park open. The funds were available to the department, Yoskowitz said, thanks to a 2019 amendment to the state sporting goods tax.
“We’d like to buy the whole thing,” Aplin said at the time.
But, with the property under contract, that would’ve required Todd Interests to step away from the deal. That didn’t happen.
Instead, Vistra formally notified the state in mid-February that its park lease would be terminated. The state park is scheduled to close to the public on Feb. 28.
After the formal lease termination notice, state Rep. Angelia Orr, a Republican from Hill County, filed a bill seeking to use eminent domain to take the park land from its private owner. Eminent domain is a legal principle that allows entities to take private land for public use, although they’re still required to pay for the land they’re acquiring.
But eminent domain is a tricky issue. While the state likely has a clear-cut legal claim to the property, according to a legal expert, the politics of eminent domain can be messy.
“Eminent domain is a very serious consideration, it’s not to be taken lightly,” Orr told the Star-Telegram.
Orr’s bill has only been filed at this stage, meaning that it would still have to proceed through a number of steps, including a vote in both the House and the Senate. As of Friday, it hadn’t been referred to a House committee for consideration.
Regardless of what happens to Fairfield Lake State Park, Orr said that she hopes this situation will spur change in the way that the state handles other park properties. There are about a dozen other parks that sit on leased land, although most of those parks are leased from other public entities.
“This is not a county or regional issue, I think it is quickly becoming a statewide issue and it’s making us have to look at other state parks and who owns or leases that,” Orr said. “I don’t know that we’re gonna have a good outcome for Fairfield Lake – I hope so – but if we don’t, at least we’ve started having discussions.”
This story was originally published February 24, 2023 at 12:35 PM.
