South Dallas residents demand action on long-promised community park

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Stop leaving the community park in limbo. 

That, essentially, was the message to City Council last week from South Dallas neighborhood residents and Fair Park First leaders, punctuated by State Rep. Venton Jones and U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett.

The long–promised community park within Fair Park was the target of the eight neighborhood residents, five business and organization leaders, and two elected officials who signed up to speak for three minutes each at last Wednesday’s City Council meeting, urging councilmembers to “hear our cries,” “honor the past,” “follow through,” “keep your promise,” “restore trust,” “get the dirt moving” and “turn this vision into a reality.”

Their collective ask came in response to a series of actions (and inaction) over the past year that has placed the community park’s timeline in jeopardy, starting with the City terminating its contract with Oak View Group and Fair Park First and concluding with a City Council committee asking why the community park was omitted from staff’s most recent presentation on Fair Park’s future. 

That omission could be related to the City Council-appointed Park Board’s discussion at September’s meeting, when two of the 15 board members expressed hesitations about re-entering a contract with nonprofit Fair Park First to focus solely on completing the community park. The board didn’t take any votes or action as the contract was expected to come up at its October meeting.

It never did.

Instead, Park Board Chair Arun Agarwal appointed a task force to “review the existing contract with Fair Park First.” The community park hasn’t made its way onto an agenda since.

Meanwhile, the State of Texas has committed $4.9 million to the community park project, the U.S. federal government has granted $8.7 million, and Fair Park First leaders say more than $30 million pledged by donors is still in play, leaving less than $6 million needed to complete the project.

However, they caution, the clock is ticking on all of these funds.

“At this point, the greatest threat to this project is not funding or feasibility — it is continued procedural delay,” said U.S. Rep. Crockett, who joined the meeting virtually, and whose admonitions were so extensive she exceeded the 3-minute time limit and couldn’t finish her statement. “Delays do not happen in a vacuum. They have real consequences for communities who were promised progress, and for partners who invested in good faith based on clear and repeated direction.”

Agarwal’s task force is tasked with assessing Fair Park First’s “ability to fulfill obligations” and the “financial achievability of the project,” as well as to “analyze the status of all pledged contributions” and to “verify fundraising progress.” It’s perhaps ironic that the money needed to complete the park is roughly the same as the amount of donors’ money “misallocated” by for-profit OVG under the nonprofit’s watch.

South Dallas resident Jason Brown, who now chairs Fair Park First’s board, wore a “No delay/ Our park today” button as he spoke to City Council, acknowledged that there have been “some hiccups.” However, he insisted, “important lessons have been learned and adjustments have been made.”

“At this point, enough is enough,” Brown said. The community is “tired of the surveys. We’re tired of the meetings. We’re tired of sitting around talking, just to get ready, get ready, hurry up — and wait.”

Though 15 people asked the City Council to get a move on, the only action taken last Wednesday was South Dallas Councilmember Adam Bazaldua using his comments acknowledging the speakers to give “notice of intent” to “discharge the Park and Recreation Board from further consideration of the funding and development agreement with Fair Park First.”

It appeared, from the clearly orchestrated speaker sign-ups, that Bazaldua intended to do more than just give notice. He said afterward that he was “ready to blow it up today and had to get talked off the ledge” by City attorneys in order to avoid an ethics violation.

His official notice gives the Park Board and Agarwal’s appointed task force “an expectation to complete the tasks they have on hand … instead of slow rolling the process,” Bazaldua told us. His goal is for Councilmembers to vote on Jan. 28 to discharge the Park Board and remand the community park to Council’s Parks, Trails and the Environment Committee, which would give elected Councilmembers the power to move the process forward, rather than waiting any longer on their appointed board members. 

That way, Bazaldua stated in his comments, the community park could “break ground in September of this year, after FIFA vacates the park grounds” following the much anticipated Fan Festival at Fair Park this summer. The task force, appointed Dec. 5, according to Agarwal’s memo, has “all the tools necessary to give the findings and recommendations to our body; however, we haven’t gotten those yet,” Bazaldua said in his comments, adding later that his actions last Wednesday should shave three months from the process. 

“I tried to avoid getting it to this place, but time is of the essence,” he said, “and so I want us to be able to take action on the 28th — one way or the other.”