Texas has lost millions of acres of land to development over the past several decades….
More than 40 years ago, the Franklin Mountains were an unprotected wilderness dominating the skylineof El Paso.
The relatively small, rugged, desert mountain range had been used at various points in history as a home for early Native American tribes, passageways for Spanish conquistadors en route to colonize Puebloan villages, bases for Apache and Comanche raids and, in the early 20th Century, a failed tin mine and smelting company. Conservationists dreamed of making the mountains a public park. Then, in 1978, locals noticed a bulldozer scarring a road up one of the peaks.
Soon after, a group of activists successfully pushed the Legislature to pass a bill in 1979 authorizing the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to acquire the Franklin Mountains through eminent domain. Eight years later, Franklin Mountains State Park opened as one of the largest urban parks in the nation, with more than 26,000 acres open to the public.
Today, such inspirational conservation victories in Texas are few and far between. Texas ranks 35th in the nation for state park acreage per capita. Instead, rampant development of more than 2.2 million acres of farms, ranches and forests over the past several decades has severely limited opportunities to expand public parks and green space. In the recent words of Gov. Greg Abbott, that means: “Fewer scouts going on scouting trips to parks, fewer kids getting to see what the outdoors is all about, and more concrete for them to live on.”
Abbott delivered those remarks at an event in Austin celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Texas State Parks. Abbott recalled formative experiences taking boy scout trips to Daingerfield State Park and Caddo Lake in East Texas.
The governor’s words strike a unifying chord. Will he put his political muscle behind them?
Fairfield Lake State Park is under threat and needs a hero. The 1,800 acres in Freestone County, 90 miles southeast of Dallas, offer miles of trails for hiking, biking and horseback riding and a vast lake for catfish and bass fishing. The park has been open to the public since 1976, but the state leases the land from private owner Vistra Corp, an energy company which now intends to sell the land to Todd Interests. This private developer plans to turn the land into a gated community with a private golf course. On Monday, Vistra notified Texas that it was terminating the state park lease.
Despite the state’s recent efforts to buy the land back and preserve it as a park, Vistra and Todd Interests have held firm. After Vistra closed a coal power plant near the park in 2018, it moved toward selling the land, but the state didn’t make an offer. Parks and Wildlife officials told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that they didn’t have the money to purchase the full acreage, and Vistra was uninterested in selling off a portion of the land. In 2021, the company placed 5,000 acres, including the state park land, on the market for $110 million. But when the parks agency received a windfall of revenue from sporting goods sales taxes, thanks to the passage of Proposition 5 in 2019 by a record-breaking 88 percent of Texas voters, it attempted to buy the entire 5,000-acre plot only to be rebuffed.
The park will close permanently at the end of the month unless the state government — as it did with the Franklin Mountains in 1979 — steps up in a last-ditch effort to save it.
State Rep. Angelia Orr, a Republican from Hill County, has gotten the ball rolling, filing a bill this week to grant Parks and Wildlife the power of eminent domain to acquire “any property necessary to preserve Fairfield Lake State Park.”
Under eminent domain, the government can acquire land for public use as long as it pays the owner a fair price. As a legally forced sale, the state should always be judicious in using that authority. Yet in this case, taxpayers have already invested roughly $70 million in improving Fairfield Lake since it was established, building trails, shelters, campsites, and fishing piers. The park is a jewel in a relatively sparsely populated area, yet still attracts about 82,000 visitors every year.
Texas uses eminent domain to build pipelines and highways, and even grants that authority to private companies, many of which use it on projects with far less public utility than a state park.
Andrew Sansom, the former executive director of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, first joined the agency during its purchase of the Franklin Mountains. Like many Texans, he values private property rights, but in this case, since the landowner abandoned negotiations over an already established state park, Sansom told the board: “I would be an advocate for the use of eminent domain.”
Texas can do so much more to preserve its park system and add new parks for future generations, starting with Fairfield Lake. A study by Texas Tech University showed the state needs to add more than a million acres to the park system by 2030 to keep up with the needs of the state’s growing population. With the state flush with cash in the form of a $33 billion surplus, the timing couldn’t be more fortuitous to dedicate a miniscule portion of those funds toward keeping at least one park from being bulldozed into fairways and putting greens.