Plan to Build Houses on Contaminated Airfield Stalls as Texas City's Fight with the Navy Continues

A plan to turn a contaminated former Navy airfield in Dallas into a neighborhood with 6,800 new homes continues to be delayed two years after officials approved a blueprint for the redevelopment they hoped would transform a long overlooked area of the southern half of the city.

A decades-long legal fight with the Navy that is still winding its way through court is behind the delay and costing taxpayers more money to pay legal fees to try to get the military branch to clean the site enough to allow residents to safely live there.

It’s been seven years since the Navy missed its 2017 deadline to clear Hensley Field of chemical contamination in the soil and groundwater on the 738-acre site that is about 10 miles from Downtown Dallas and borders Mountain Creek Lake. The Navy leased the property from the city from 1949 to 1999 and the cleanup agreement was the result of a 2001 lawsuit the city filed against the federal government, citing the contamination as a breach of contract.

The Dallas City Council in 2022 approved an estimated $390 million, 20-year plan to transform Hensley Field into a mixed-use neighborhood that could be home to around 12,000 residents. The plan included new parks, waterfront trails, shops, restaurants, a marina, school and film studio. Dallas sued again in 2023 arguing the Navy’s delay on environmental cleanup has put the city’s redevelopment plans in limbo, diminished the site’s market value, and illegally infringed on the city’s property rights.

“This has been a long-time discussion and the fact that we got to a point where we developed a master plan is progress,” said Dallas council member Zarin Gracey, who represents the area. “The last update I got was that they’re still going through negotiations on remediation and I’m trying to be patient in terms of what could come. But I’m looking forward to it, we all are.”

The City Council on Nov. 13 approved increasing its contract with Washington D.C.-based law firm Covington & Burling to $850,000, a $300,000 increase, to continue the legal fight. The city initially agreed to a $100,000 contract in June 2023. The November increase was the third contract amendment approved by the council.

No clear timetable has been announced for when Hensley Field will be clear of contaminants like perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS. The compounds can be hazardous to humans and studies have shown they could lead to increased risks of cancer, liver damage, pregnancy complications, birth defects and other health effects, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Parts of Hensley Field are used for an assortment of city storage, including old police squad cars and Confederate-era monuments.

David Bennett, a Navy spokesman, declined to comment when asked by The Dallas Morning News if the military branch had any estimate on when the cleanup would be complete and how much has been spent on the effort. Nick Starling, a Dallas spokesman, said the city declined to comment because of the ongoing lawsuit.

The city bought the Hensley Field site in the late 1920s and leased it to the U.S. Army to train reserve pilots. A naval reserve air station was built in 1941, administration of the field was transferred to the Navy in 1949.

The Navy agreed in a 2002 court settlement with Dallas to pay the city more than $18 million and clean up the site by 2017. City officials in 2022 said the Navy had spent $92.4 million in clean up costs, that the soil was clean enough to meet Texas Commission on Environmental Quality standards, but groundwater contamination still hasn’t been fully addressed.

The Navy, in a May 2024 response to the city’s lawsuit, said it shouldn’t be held to “performance under the 2002 settlement agreement on grounds of impracticability or impossibility.”

The Navy said it tried to meet the 2017 deadline and speed up the cleanup process. But strategies to do so were ruled out, in part because of the soil conditions. Moving forward with other options to clean the groundwater would be “extremely expensive” and unlikely to cut down on how quickly the site was cleaned.

The Navy also argued that cleaning up PFAS wasn’t on the table when the 2002 settlement was reached.

“Remediation of PFAS would vastly increase the cost of performance of the 2002 settlement agreement, such that it would cause extreme and unreasonable difficulty and expense and would constitute a cardinal change to the agreement,” the Navy’s response said, claiming that monitoring the natural decline of PFAS in groundwater could require at least 100 years to meet state and federal environmental standards.

A June court filing said both sides had been in talks about how to resolve the case without a trial since before the 2023 lawsuit and “have continued those discussions on a bi-monthly schedule during this litigation.” Both parties anticipate the lawsuit going to trial if a settlement or some other resolution couldn’t be reached, the document said.

An updated status report is due by Dec. 13, court records show.

©2024 The Dallas Morning News. Visit dallasnews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.