It must be spring: City council elections are looming on May 9, yard signs are sprouting like weeds, and urban gas drilling is a fiery topic on the campaign trail.
Not surprisingly, some candidates and their supporters figure that another local spring tradition, the Fort Worth Prairie Fest, coming up on Saturday, would make a fine place to carry the debate. After all, Tandy Hills Natural Area is a prime example of the drilling industry’s threat to the local quality of life, with wells planned for just outside the park’s wildflower-covered hillsides.
And you’d think they’d be welcomed with open arms, since festival founder Don Young is perhaps the city’s most vocal critic of drilling. But Young insists that the festival this year will be a temporary cease-fire zone in which everyone can enjoy their surroundings together.
“We don’t want a bunch of politicking going on,” he said. “Politics is
usually ugly.”
In fact, the festival, which started out as a gathering of about 400 pissed-off environmentalists in Young’s front yard four years ago, has grown into a substantial event. Even city hall, in whose side Young has been a persistent thorn on matters related to drilling and other threats to the park, is participating heavily. “We’re more involved this year than we have been before,” said Melody Mitchell, assistant parks and recreation director.
More than 3,000 people are expected to turn out to enjoy attractions such as nature tours, music, painting, and booths promoting “green” power. The event has moved from Young’s front yard to the park and has received federal nonprofit status.
A “wildflower love-in,” Young calls it. “The best thing of all is the prairie itself.”
He leads the Friends of Tandy Hills Nature Area, which is dedicated to protecting the Eastside preserve with its unexpected bounty of native wildflowers and grasses. Situated just south of I-30 near Oakland Boulevard, Tandy Hills is an overlooked gem and one of the few local examples left of the prairie that covered this part of Texas before fencing, cattle, and urban development took over.
Park lovers became enraged several years ago when the city announced it would allow horizontal drilling underneath the park. And Young has also fought a long-running battle to get the city to keep trees from taking over the prairie. This year, the city finally agreed to cut down encroaching trees, and Young’s band of volunteers turned out to help drag debris to where it could be picked up by city crews.
In previous years, politicians haven’t been shy about pressing the flesh at the festival. State Rep. Lon Burnam and Fort Worth City Council member Kathleen Hicks spoke at the first festival. Hicks has returned every year since. “A lot of Eastside parks don’t get the recognition they deserve,” she said.
This year, council candidates may be there again, though they’re not allowed to campaign at the festival. Suzette Watkins, who is running against Hicks in District 8, said she will be there as part of the Texas Humane Legislative Network. Clyde Picht, who is running for mayor, and District 3 candidate Gary Hogan are also expected to make the rounds.
But when a couple of other candidates wanted to go a step further (both council candidate W.B. “Zim” Zimmerman and mayoral hopeful Louis McBee asked to set up booths), Young said no. He doesn’t mind a little healthy debate but is discouraging political sermons in an election year. Besides, under the rules that the festival now has to follow to keep its nonprofit status, if one candidate is allowed a booth, all candidates have to be given the same opportunity – something Young wasn’t prepared to do.
To keep things light, he has stacked the weekend lineup with an eclectic, sometimes ironic set of entertainers ranging from the Grammy Award-winning Brave Combo to local bluegrass group the Blackland River Devils to the Brazen Bellies, a troupe of plus-sized belly dancers with a political bent to their act.
The festival “always was designed to be a bit edgy,” Young said.
The edginess was in full tilt during that first year in 2005: Young’s brainchild started off as anathema to the city, whose officials refused to take part in an event openly hostile to gas drilling. Now the city is helping sponsor the festival, though the policy toward drilling under the park hasn’t changed. City departments will help compost and recycle materials from the festival and will educate attendees about the processes. Young said a spirit of cooperation and friendly dialogue for a weekend helps to ease relationships among activists, city employees, and elected officials.
Fort Worth residents rate parks and nature preservation among the top things they want the city to spend money on, Hicks said, citing feedback from the “Let’s Talk Fort Worth” public forum in September. Park preservation is music to the ears of the Tandy Hills activists as well.
The festival will boast 20 or so en plein air artists painting pictures of the landscape and selling their works on the spot, with at least 40 percent of their sales going to a general park fund. Carol Ivey, a painter and organizer of the outdoor art event, said artists expect to sell their oil and watercolor paintings, most of them small in scale, for a couple hundred dollars each.
Many of the artists who participated in last year’s festival found themselves going back again to Tandy Hills to paint on their own time, Ivey said. “It’s very alive and experiential.”
The festival is also solar-powered, a first for local events. “We want people to wake up and start doing something to make the world a better place,” Young said.
Darrin Kobetich of the Blackland River Devils said the band took that name after playing Prairie Fest as the Electric Mountain Rotten Apple Gang. Texas’ actual Blackland Prairie once stretched from the Red River south through Fort Worth and almost to San Antonio. Now only remnants of actual grasslands remain, and Tandy Hills is among the most diverse.
“I didn’t even know there was a prairie here, but it’s nice to see people trying to preserve it,” Kobetich said.
