A brief follow-up to my post last week Fairfield Lake State Park is Gone. There is one last step in this process, an appeal in a civil court. At this time we don’t know if the state is giving up or moving forward to the civil court phase.
This year has been very scattered for me. Keeping track of what I’ve done or not done, well, usually I can pull things out of my brain easily and focus. I have not been myself this year. I took this year to address a myriad of health issues so my mind has been on that, too, but the rest of my brain has really and truthfully been far too full of state park activism. To be honest, I hate it.
I have relished the quietness of the last two months or so, the pause between the constant action and updates from the developer and the slow movement of our legal system as the eminent domain process found its way through the Freestone County courthouse. Part of me despised the quiet—we knew things are still moving along in the background with property destruction and we had no control over it. The other part of me was saying “Finally, I can breathe, I can focus, I can get back to my life!” I’ve felt the need to write online less, share online less, slowly pull back from Instagram, Substack, my blog—all the places. And I see others doing the same. This isn’t something just associated with state park activism, or me.
And then my brain was thrust back into it all last week with the 3-person commission that determined the valuation and the debacle that has ensued. To be clear, this is all of my own making. No one is forcing me to have taken a somewhat active role in this. If you asked me in early February this year if I saw myself still working on this in November I would have laughed at you. But it didn’t take long to notice the leadership that I expecting to form from some already established environmental group wasn’t going to form. I wasn’t ready to just “Let it go” as one Freestone County troll said last week. If you don’t fight for something you believe in, do you even have morals and ethics? Yes, the easy way is to let it go, to move on and let someone else do the heavy lifting. But what if no one does the heavy lifting? It’s much easier to have a large group of people lifting than one or two people struggling to lift megatons of political bullshit into the light of day.
There are several variations of this meme, but this is where my brain wants to be right now. It wants calm, and quiet. I was hoping to get that last week. I was hoping for an end to this. But it isn’t over yet. The state has 20 days to appeal and it is unknown at this time what they will do. The over valuation sets a bad precedent and I cannot see them just letting this go unchallenged.
There are many more details I want to write about right now but just don’t have the bandwidth for it. What I really need is for the Texas journalism community to actually care about this story. I know everyone is spread thin and there are things going down throughout the state that require coverage but it’s been frustrating to see misinformation and bad information being perpetuated consistently, with really only one reporter, Brett Shipp from Spectrum News, doing any kind of hard challenging work on this. Again, it’s a lot easier to do heavy lifting if more people are involved.
So, what’s next? We’re on a time crunch so if you are in Texas I need you to contact your representatives to tell them to push TPWD to file an appeal and to email TPWD and tell them the same.
Email or call Texas Parks and Wildlife to say you support them going through the appeal process: (512) 389-4800 to call, email: dee.halliburton@tpwd.texas.gov
Email your representatives to support TPWD appealing the ED valuation in court: https://wrm.capitol.texas.gov/home
Until next time, Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you get outside and enjoy some nature this week. I’m going to do the same—because we can’t always be in fighting mode.
While I understand your impulse, I hope you don't quit completely. Your contribution remains important and Texas media pay little attention to environmental issues and land use, unless it's private property development rights, in part, because it is like shouting into the wind. I'm afraid, however, expecting the state to appeal is unlikely to happen. It will consider the case to be interfering with free enterprise, and, I suspect, the influential parties have probably already made the strategic political contributions. This is, after all, Texas.
Thanks for your leadership and communications on the Fairfield Lake debacle all year.