‘A shame’: Texas may soon lose 1,800-acre state park on Fairfield Lake to developer

The state of Texas is poised to lose an 1,800-acre state park that has been open to the public for nearly 50 years, as the private landowner plans to sell the property to a developer.

Fairfield Lake State Park, about 100 miles southeast of Dallas-Fort Worth, is one of 89 state parks in Texas. It offers 10 miles of trails for hiking, biking and horseback riding, along with extensive shoreline for fishing.

But the land, though used as a public resource, is not actually publicly owned.

Texas Parks and Wildlife has leased the 1,800 acres since the 1970s from Vistra Corp., which used to operate a power plant nearby. Fairfield Lake itself, which is more than 2,000 acres, was constructed as a cooling reservoir for that power plant. The company, through subsidiary Luminant, closed that power plant in 2018 and placed its entire 5,000-acre property on the market in 2021.

The land, including the lake and the state park, was listed for $110 million and advertised as the “largest private water offering in the state of Texas.” The listing sparked concern that the park could be closed under a different owner. Until recently, the park remained open and unsold. In 2022, the park saw about 82,000 visitors, Parks and Wildlife staff said.

But now, the property is under contract. And the potential new owner “has no intention of continuing the state park lease,” according to a Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission meeting agenda from late January.

The buyer is not identified in the meeting agenda and Vistra declined to identify the buyer, but Parks and Wildlife officials said they’ve met with Shawn Todd, of the Dallas-based development company Todd Interests, about the property. Todd did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

The closure of a state park would strike a particularly hard blow in Texas, which has relatively little public land to begin with. Of all the land in Texas, only about 5% is publicly owned.

It’s also not the way that Janice Bezanson, the senior policy director for Texas Conservation Alliance and a longtime conservationist, had hoped to start 2023. This year is the 100th anniversary of the founding of Texas’ state parks; it had been slated as a year of celebration, as well as the opening year for the state’s newest park, in Palo Pinto.

“What we were hoping to do was to highlight the need to be expanding parks,” Bezanson said. “And suddenly we’re starting the centennial year with the prospect of closing one, which is really a shame.”

Vistra spokesperson Meranda Cohn said in an email that the company has provided the land for public use, at no charge, since the 1970s.

“We have received no compensation,” Cohn wrote. “The company has continued to be responsible for the upkeep of the lake, dam, and property taxes.”

Cohn said that when Vistra closed the power plant in 2018, it notified Parks and Wildlife and encouraged the department to make an offer on the full 5,000 acres.

Beaver Aplin, the founder of Buc-ee’s who serves as chairman of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, said the department didn’t have the money at the time to purchase the property. The agency asked instead to buy just the park land. Both Aplin and Cohn said Vistra was only interested in selling the entire property.

“We never got to first base,” Aplin said. “The answer was, ‘No, we’re not splitting it, we’re doing it as one sale.’”

The company then began marketing the entire property for sale publicly in 2021. And while Vistra’s position on selling the entire property intact has not changed, the state’s budget has.

The department now has the money to purchase the entire 5,000 acres, said the Parks and Wildlife Department’s executive director, David Yoskowitz. The funding shift is thanks to a 2019 amendment to the sporting goods tax, which Yoskowitz called “a game changer for the department.”

But now the property is under contract. If the situation doesn’t change, Vistra has indicated to Parks and Wildlife that the sales contract will take another step forward on Feb. 3, Aplin said.

It’s unclear what the buyer will do with the land if the sale goes through. The listing agent, Cash McWhorter of the Hortenstine Ranch Co., declined to answer specific questions.

However, the listing itself describes the whole 5,000-acre property and its 21 miles of shoreline as a “blank canvas offering massive development potential.” The land, the listing says, could be turned into “a private ranch, hunting and fishing club” or developed for “residential, commercial, corporate, leisure, theme park, and resort” uses.

Bezanson, the conservationist, said she can’t remember another time when a Texas state park has been fully lost to the public. Although properties sometimes change hands, she said they’ve typically remained open to the public.

“This would be kind of a first, for a public park to suddenly become private and off-limits to the public,” Bezanson said.

With a contract already in place and another deadline rapidly approaching, there isn’t a lot of time to find a solution that would keep Fairfield Lake State Park open to the public.

But both Aplin and Yoskowitz said they’re still hopeful.

“We’d like to buy the whole thing,” Aplin said. “We now see a path to do that.”