Dallas conservative, Austin liberal unite in push for Texas to set aside $1B for new parks

AUSTIN — They met on Twitter 18 months ago sparring over whether wind turbines are harmful to birds.

Luke Metzger, 47, is an Austin environmental leader who about 15 years ago led a successful campaign to preserve the Christmas Mountains in far West Texas from being sold at an auction. This year, he’s championed bills to rein in polluters, lobbied lawmakers to give property tax breaks to landowners trying to save Texas’ bees and passionately defended renewables.

Doug Deason, 61, is a hemisphere-trotting Dallas businessman and conservative activist who five years ago sought to influence selection of EPA science advisers under former President Donald Trump. He likes nuclear power and vehemently disses wind and solar, something Metzger clearly supports.

“If it weren’t for fossil fuels, there’d still be billions of people trapped in poverty,” Deason said in an interview last month.

The duo’s constrasting political beliefs and the divergent allies those differences attract have led to the most tantalizing and hopeful opportunity that Texas has had in at least three decades to finally buy and build enough state parks to catch up with a surging population.

And the timing of this unlikely partnership couldn’t be more ideal, as this year marks the 100th anniversary of Texas state parks.

While such a milestone is worthy of a celebration, the current realities of the park system are not.

Texas ranks 35th among the states in state park acreage per capita. And that’s an upgrade from where it once ranked. Take recent developments this year as an example. Barring a change of heart or legislative action, Texas will lose 5,000-acre Fairfield Lake State Park soon to development as an exclusive gated community.

If major money isn’t devoted to the system soon, there’s no way long-stymied plans for new parks within 90 miles of the Dallas-Houston-San Antonio triangle will launch. It will also be impossible for the state to fulfill a 2001 prophecy by Texas Tech University that if it were to buy 1.4 million acres for parks by 2030, it might finally come close to meeting demand.

This is another reason why the Deason and Metzger collaboration is notable and drawing interest, attention and support at the Capitol in Austin, even from Gov. Greg Abbott who has already publicly encouraged lawmakers to approve additional investments in parks.

Deason and Metzger’s strategy has been to talk up parks with lawmakers they align with in a year when state leaders have a wad of extra money, $27 billion in a rainy day fund and a record-breaking $32.7 billion revenue surplus, because of Texas’ swift rebound from COVID-19, sparing use of federal pandemic relief money and continued economic vitality.

The two are asking for a sliver of it: $1 billion to create a Centennial Parks Conservation Fund. That will be enough state matching money to attract $5 billion of private and federal funds, they said. All of that money would be sufficient to meet the goal of acquiring another 1.4 million acres – if not in six years, in coming decades, they said.

Longtime champions of Texas State Parks are getting excited, and sense opportunity, too, along with urgency.

“I have never been more hopeful for the future of our state parks and land conservation in Texas,” said Andy Sansom, who served as executive director of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department under former Govs. Bill Clements, Ann Richards and George W. Bush.

“Already, Texans wait for weeks to get reservations” at many state parks, Sansom noted.

“Open landscape is disappearing. Our population is exploding. The need is huge,” he said. “To see not just 55 organizations and normally strange bedfellows like Luke and Doug rally behind efforts to secure new park funding, but our state leaders as well -- I’m just absolutely thrilled.”

‘Fighting for scraps’

When it comes to parks, Texas started out at a deficit.

Because of its unique status as an independent country before it was admitted to the Union in 1845, Texas kept much of its unoccupied lands. In most other Western states, such land has been owned by the federal government. But in Texas, about 94% of land is privately owned. That impeded conservation efforts, and especially, public access for recreation.

In the 1920s, as America entered the automobile age, many Texans, especially auto dealers and women’s groups, wanted a modern state highway system. National parks were just coming online and the car salesmen, garden clubs and women’s clubs called for a new system of state parks as well.

North Texas played a big role in rallying support, historians said. Florence George Martin of Dallas was a member of the original State Park Board. She was nationally known for advocating progressive farming techniques and new parks, and newspapers at the time in Fort Worth and Dallas trumpeted the cause, said Texas parks historian James W. Steely of Denver.

Texas families using the newly built highways needed places to stay, he said. Already, private entrepreneurs were creating campgrounds on the edge of Texas towns, Steely said.

Backed by then-Gov. Pat Neff, parks and good-roads proponents argued for a state system that could offer campgrounds, lodges and amenities for travelers.

Their efforts caught on, said state parks historian and advocate George Bristol of Fort Worth. “It just was an idea whose time had come.”

Martin, who divided her time between Dallas and Marshall, where her husband William Clifton Martin owned a plantation, played a key role in nudging The Dallas Morning News in the early 1920s to highlight a need for state parks.

“Davis Mountains to Be Park?” read a banner headline on July 10, 1921. Unfortunately, until Big Bend was formally established in 1944, there wasn’t a national park in Texas.

Neff campaigned on parks in winning re-election in 1922 and the next year, he got the Legislature to approve creating a State Parks Board.

Martin was vice chairwoman of the original board that Neff appointed in 1923. Three of the five board members were women.

In town square after town square, the board and Neff held rallies to persuade local citizens they should build – and operate with local volunteers and local funds – a state park near their cities.

“Mrs. Martin made sure the Dallas News printed all their press releases and covered some of their travels,” Steely said.

The News’ coverage of board “events and successes” continued through the 1930s and World War II, he said.

The Legislature accepted gifts of land for state parks, but offered the board no money for their development or upkeep.

“It was a tenuous move at best,” said Bristol, whom former President Bill Clinton named to the National Parks Foundation.

During the Great Depression, then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps put people who’d lost their jobs to work – among other things, building parks. Congressional Texas Democrats wielded outsized clout then, and pulled strings to get Corps teams assigned to their districts. Some 40 state parks were built.

“We got a fantastic system out of that,” said Steely, who chronicled the state park system’s first big expansion phase in a 1999 book, “Parks for Texas: Enduring Landscapes of the New Deal.”

In the two decades after World War II, excitement and support dissipated, historians said.

Then, under President Lyndon B. Johnson, Congress passed the Land and Water Conservation Act in 1966. The following year, Texas Gov. John Connally persuaded the Legislature to pass a $75 million bond issue that, together with adoption of a state parks master plan, allowed Texas to draw down millions more of the new federal law’s matching money. Over a more than two-decade span, Texas acquired 63 state parks.

It began catching up with a surging state population. But then financial support again lagged. In 1993, advocates again urged lawmakers to give the Parks and Wildlife Department a reliable stream of tax dollars – from the 6-¼-cent state sales tax on sporting goods.

For the next 16 years, the Legislature did so only haltingly, diverting most of what’s now a $200 million annual revenue stream for other priorities. The 2001 Texas Tech study became a rallying cry. Commissioned by the department, it lamented that the system was falling far behind its growing population – and would need 1.4 million new acres.

In 2006, then-AT&T executive and former state Sen. John Montford described deplorable conditions.

“When you’ve got the restrooms padlocked, they’re deteriorating, they’re unsanitary, I mean, that’s not what we want our state to represent,” who headed the State Parks Advisory Committee, appointed by Joseph Fitzsimons, then chairman of the Parks and Wildlife Commission.

In 2019, voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 5, which ended the department’s funding drought – at least for maintaining the 89 parks, natural areas and historic sites it still operates.

“The department’s been fighting for scraps,” Metzger said.

Potential enemies share a cause

Political polarization, long a fact of life in Washington, D.C., has been unavoidable in the hinterlands. Still, how Deason and Metzger joined forces, if imitated, could help hold back the tide of suspicion and distrust that frequently plays out in Austin over important issues. At least, both said that’s their hope.

Deason’s wife, Jacki Pick Deason, is host of the Jacki Daily Show on conservative radio network The Blaze. She is well-known for her slashing attacks on renewable energy, recalled Metzger, who has spent his career advocating greater use of wind and solar power.

In late 2021, Doug Deason retweeted a state lawmaker’s post criticizing wind energy. Deason added what appeared to be a photoshopped image of a dead eagle being held by a woman, with wind turbines in the background. Metzger replied to Deason’s tweet that reducing “impacts” on birds is important, though he said “carbon pollution” threatens them more.

That set off more dialogue – civil, but at times a vigorous debate – between Deason and Metzger.

A few months later, Metzger said he thought of Deason as he prepared studies and public-relations materials for a campaign to persuade the Legislature to ramp up parkland acquisition.

“We needed some more powerful allies,” Metzger recalled. Deason had started following him on Twitter. So Metzger DM’d him to pitch him on Environment Texas’ Million Acre Parks Project.

“I just had this hunch and I figured it was worth a shot,” Metzger said.

Deason, out of the country at the time, said he would call Metzger when he returned to Texas. The two had productive chats, and by last summer, Deason agreed to be on the Million Acre Parks Project’s steering committee.

Doug is the son of Affiliated Computer Services billionaire Darwin Deason. Doug Deason has been on the board of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. A few years ago, he successfully advocated “right on crime” bills in Congress and the Texas Legislature. He’s still active on that front. This session, he’s chairman of Texans for Free Enterprise, which is pushing state-funded education savings accounts, which would help families afford private schools.

Deason grew up in Rogers, Ark., in the Ozarks.

“In the summer, my mom would drop my brother and me off at a creek with a lunch pail and a big jug of water and we’d just hike and fish all day,” he said. He’s an avid hunter and fisherman.

Metzger was an Army brat active in Boy Scouts who loved hiking in Germany’s Black Forest and camping in the Alps, he said.

Last fall, Deason recruited freshman Flower Mound GOP Sen. Tan Parker, a former longtime Denton County House member, to spearhead the $1 billion parks push in the Senate. Deason has also lobbied Arch “Beaver” Aplin III, the Buc-ee’s truck stop chain chief executive who is also chairman of the state Parks and Wildlife Commission.

Early this year, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick “reached out and said he liked the idea” and thanked Deason for proposing it, Deason recalled. “I said it wasn’t me, it’s Luke Metzger’s idea,” he said.

Though Metzger and Deason said they’ve jointly met with a few lawmakers, they generally work the ones they’ve long cultivated – for Metzger, mostly Democrats; for Deason, mostly Republicans.

“I go around [the Capitol] mainly working on ESAs,” Deason said, referring to school choice. “So as I talk to people, I do talk about” parkland needs. “Everybody liked the idea. I’ve never heard one single, negative word.”

Having ranchers and other major landowners preserve vistas using conservation easements, which take lands off the tax rolls in return for the owners’ pledge not to develop the tracts, is fine, Deason said.

“But we want the public to have access,” he said. “That’s what we’re pushing for.”

“It truly is a left-right effort,” Deason said.

As Metzger put together his Million Acre Parks Project last year, he got some push-back for his alliance with Deason.

“I did have someone decline to be on the steering committee because Deason supported Trump,” he recalled.

Metzger said other conservation leaders last year “thought I was crazy to ask for $1 billion. They said, ‘You’re not going to go anywhere. That’ll anger legislators if I ask for so much money.’”

But Deason’s instant embrace dashed any doubts, Metzger said, who said his jaw dropped when he saw Deason receive encouraging texts from Patrick and other powerful Republicans.

“It’s a different world I’m operating in,” he said.

“Now it seems like we have a real chance.”

CORRECTION, 5:15 p.m., April 26, 2023: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said a state rainy day fund has $27 million. It has $27 billion.