A Quick Fairfield Lake State Park Update
Todd Interests held a 45 minute press conference on the Freestone County courthouse steps this morning.
I have more to write about this but I wanted to get something out tonight with the latest about the fight for Fairfield Lake State Park.
It became known late on Tuesday that Todd Interests, the developer who recently purchased the former Fairfield Lake State Park, Fairfield Lake, and adjacent land around the lake from Vistra/Luminant, was going to hold a PR show at the Freestone county courthouse today at 11am. The information was sent out by Freestone county commissioners, the same ones who had done an about face on their support for the park to suddenly supporting Todd Interests a few weeks ago.
Those of us who have loosely organized the last few months scurried to rally some folks to attend, in protest but also to generally have a presence there. The press was being called and the Freestone Co commissioners intentionally only sent the message out to certain landowners who were pro-development. Things are sketchy as hell about all of this right now but that’s for another essay.
I drafted a template email and then started emailing the Houston Chronicle (who had been sympathetic to the park and TPW) and other newspapers and then started hitting up various environmental organizations around the state. A couple did end up emailing back but the short turn around didn’t allow any of them to really get on the ground to support us in time. That’s fine—it’s on the radar now.
This morning, finally, Arch Aplin, the Chairman of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, had an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News (of all places! It’s been a Todd Interests mouthpiece for months!), so that started the day off right. We’ve been petitioning TPWD for weeks to speak up and say something with the onslaught of PR Todd Interests has been running for the last month. And it’s been crickets. For those not in the know, Arch Aplin’s other name is Beaver Aplin, aka: the owner of Buc-ee’s!
I was not able to attend in person—very disappointed about that—so I watched it live on KWTX and recorded it on my phone to re-listen later. I want to embed videos here but Substack doesn’t like Facebook embedding codes so you will just have to click the links to get through to see them. Please do, and if you have the stomach to watch the whole 45 minutes do so!
+KWTX 5 minute segment at the top and then the full 45 minute PR video is at the bottom of this article. Luke Metzger with Environment Texas has a short interview in the middle of this one.
+Fox4 segment about the PR stunt plus an interview with Sandy Emmons who was there to support the park. Also, you get a glimpse of the others who were there in support of the park, too. You can read Sandy’s interview on OTN here and also Dennis Walsh’s interview here.
Something I’ll write more on soon is this talk about how we should be blaming the state for not buying the property sooner—and yes, there is a fault to that. But you start digging it doesn’t take you long to find out for the better part of 30-35 years TPWD has been so severely underfunded by elected officials that they couldn’t buy anything more than a $1-2 million dollar parcel here and there with their own funding. They’ve had several large tracts purchased with multiple funding sources/donations in the early 2010s, including the Palo Pino Mtns State Park, but it and others have never been opened because there was no money to even open it to the public. It’s really a damn travesty and frankly, every single person saying “The state should have done something” also elected all of these folks who could have done something in the first place. I don’t claim them—I was too young to vote for most of the 90s, spent most of the 2000s in Florida, and when I came back to Texas in late 2010, Aggie that I might be, Rick Perry wasn’t on my list of folks to vote for. I try to keep this non-partisan because everyone enjoys nature and everyone can learn from it—it isn’t about party lines when you are outside—but it’s really hard to do that when it’s pretty blatantly obvious to see the department has been sabotaged for decades by one party rule. That said, Shawn Todd did bring up Democrat Nathan Johnson today—he who incapacitated the Senate committee hearing of Angelia Orr’s bill—and I’m still of the opinion he needs to be primaried.
There’s just so much to write. It’s time to move past the eminent domain discussion—it isn’t up for discussion in this situation anymore; we’re all tired of trying to cater to people who want to make it a debate—and focus on what is going to be lost with this development. And while we citizens are losing out on a natural resource for recreational purposes, it is really the flora and fauna losing their homes and lives here that’s the biggest deal.
You can’t get that back.
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness. She hosts two podcasts, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and The Garden Path Podcast.
Thanks for the update, Misti.
Well said!
And I was voting in the last 3 decades and my candidates never win. We haven’t had a good governor in a long time. We get the politicians that the guys with truck nuts vote for. Ahh, Texas :(