The Cruel and Unusual Building of the Texas Horse Park

Dylan Hollingsworth

Kevin Woods wanted to work with the Texas Horse Park. He ended up getting stampeded by it.

Hunched over a table at a Jack in the Box, Kevin Woods doesn't look much like a cowboy. No hat, no belt buckle, no boots, not a horse in sight. Here, tucked between a cluster of warehouses and a bustling urban highway, is about as far from the open range as a Texan can be. With his plain red T-shirt lightly dusted with sheetrock, and his calloused hands entwined in front of him, he looks like the home-repair contractor that he is. But it's a cowboy's blood that runs through Woods. This is a man who's broken wild mustangs and wrestled half-ton steers to submission in soft dirt, who can rope a calf and shoe a horse, who's as comfortable in the saddle as behind the wheel of a truck.

Woods was born into farm life in Stamps, Arkansas, a hollowed-out agricultural town a few miles north of the Louisiana border. He left as fast as he could, fleeing for Toledo, Ohio at 14. He took with him his fondness for horses and livestock, but his passion lay fallow for several years as he clawed for survival. He slept on the streets and rummaged through garbage cans for scraps before he fell in with a gang, started dealing drugs and pulled himself out of homelessness.

"I was one of the drug dealers you didn't want to meet on the streets," he says. "I'm the one Momma warned you about. You know, like I said, I was taught in the school of hard knocks."

The law caught up with him in Iowa, where he was convicted of felony assault. He maintains the men he attacked were trying to rob him, but he was sentenced to just under three years in prison.

Prison was transformational for Woods, not so much because of the monotony of life behind bars as what it caused him to miss. He'd fathered a daughter when he was 18. With Woods in his mid-20s, she was entering elementary school. Woods and her mother had divorced, but he'd married again. "I can't be that father to protect my child if I'm out here doing wrong things," he says, recounting his awakening. "I can't provide for my family if I'm dead or I'm locked up."

Upon his release in 1999, he moved back to Ohio with his second wife and stepdaughter and started a concrete company. It provided a decent living for several years until he relocated to Arkansas, where the construction market was soft. In 2007, his business going belly up, Woods found work in Texas welding overhead cranes and moved the family to Euless.

He brought several horses, stabling them on a plot of land in Pleasant Grove, where the disintegrating nub of Elam Road is swallowed by the Great Trinity Forest. He subleased his spot from the Wild Bunch, one of the black trail-riding clubs that form the core of southern Dallas' blue-collar horse culture. He was fastidious about his horses, keeping them in a stable he rigged up from discarded pallets.

The welding job disappeared soon enough, but that didn't matter. Pleasant Grove is teeming with horses, most of them kept on small lots by people like Woods: transplants from East Texas or Louisiana or Arkansas who have clung to a token of their rural heritage. These aren't high-dollar animals, but there were enough, between the Wild Bunch and other neighbors who heard about his skill as a farrier and horse trainer, that Woods could eke out a living.

Soon kids from the neighborhood were showing up, first his stepdaughter's classmates and then others as word spread. They were kids whose futures were being torpedoed by poverty and broken families and low expectations, who could spiral into drugs or violence at any moment. Most had never encountered a horse up close or ventured more than a few feet into the vast swath of forest they lived next to.

"When I see them kids over in the Pleasant Grove area, I seen a lot of me," he says. "My thing was show them there was a better way than the way they was going."

Horses were his tool. The kids were clumsy with them at first, but Woods showed them how to gain a horse's trust, then eased them into the saddle and led them through basic riding lessons. As the kids grew more comfortable, he taught them the basics of care, feeding and brushing and saddling. He had no plans grander than this until about 2010, when he was approached by Texas Horse Park Inc., a nonprofit that had contracted with Dallas City Hall to run a lavish, city-funded equestrian facility planned for across Elam Road.

"A guy from the Texas Horse Park come down, ask me do I know anything about the property back there," Woods remembers. "I said, 'Yeah I know pretty much about it.' I done a lot of riding back there with my horses and stuff, and they asked me, 'Would you like to show us around?' I said, 'Sure, I'll show you around.' And so as time went on, probably about a couple of months later, they told me Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison was coming, and they would like to know if I would lead and do a trail ride for them, me knowing the property back there pretty much, so I did that. Balls started rolling from there."

At the time, it seemed to Woods that those balls were rolling in his direction. If he'd ever had occasion to pause and reflect on his life goals, there would have been three: to provide for his family, to make a living working with horses and to help the troubled kids in Pleasant Grove -- the "mini-mes," as he calls them. He was doing all that, and he was poised to help even more kids as word of his mentorship program spread and he formalized it into a nonprofit.

But what Woods didn't yet understand was that the grand vision for the Texas Horse Park left no room for a homespun horse operation or anything else that had sprung from the native soil. The vision sought to remake the area out of whole-cloth, seizing land, running off occupants and entrusting the multimillion dollar project to an accused horse abuser from Plano.

That realization, the one he's reliving now inside this freeway-side Jack in the Box, came later.

"The thing was to get us out the picture," he says. "Once they got us out the picture, they would have their way."

An early, and elaborate, vision for the Horse Park.

In 1995, not long before Woods was being shipped off to prison in Iowa, the Trinity River Corridor Citizens Committee, an unwieldy group of several hundred Dallas residents and politicians, presented its final report. Two years in the making, the document described in broad strokes a vision for overhauling the city's oft-disparaged waterway. It included early renderings of a meandering parkway running along the river near downtown; plans for overhauling the city's flood-control system; a rough blueprint for parks, trails and amenities that would transform the Great Trinity Forest from a habitually ignored backwater into a recreational paradise. It was embraced by Mayor Ron Kirk as a mandate and became the seed for the Trinity River Corridor Project, the largest public works program in Dallas history.

Nowhere did the report mention a horse park. It briefly mentioned horse stables and floated the idea of turning the typically vacant stalls at Fair Park into a year-round "equestrian club." But an "equestrian center" didn't show up until two years later, in the 1998 bond program that the committee's report spawned, and even the most civic-minded voters could be forgiven for missing it, buried as it was beneath a quarter-billion dollars of controversial toll road, less-controversial flood protections and fancy urban lakes. Either way, voters' approval of the bond package planted the seed for the Texas Horse Park.

That seed sprouted in August 2002, when the City Council voted to pay a firm called BRW Architects $500,000 to develop a plan for an equestrian center and what would become the Trinity River Audubon Center. In BRW's initial vision, the equestrian center would be a no-frills boarding facility in Pleasant Grove: a single barn with a few dozen stalls, a couple of small warm-up and exercise arenas and a generous supply of pastureland. Total cost: $3.3 million.

The problem, says architect Craig Reynolds, the "R" in BRW, was that the firm "very quickly determined it needed to grow into quite a bit larger facility to break even." They considered bumping it to $11.4 million, but apparently that wouldn't do either. BRW submitted a feasibility study to City Council in 2004 predicting that a facility of this modesty would lose $36,560 per year.

Reynolds began reaching out to his contacts in the local horse community. Diane Pitts, his Lakewood neighbor and current president of the U.S. Eventing Association, was one of the first people he approached. She doesn't remember exactly when she first spoke to him about the horse park, but soon after she and a brain trust of local horse enthusiasts were meeting in Reynolds' office, debating how to improve Dallas' horse park.

They all agreed it was a shame that Texas, home to more horses than any other state, lacked a championship-caliber facility to host events across all equestrian disciplines. There are horse facilities, of course: Fort Worth can accommodate reining and cutting competitions; the Tyler Rose Horse Park is good for hunter/jumper shows and dressage; Weatherford can do eventing. But nothing like the Kentucky Horse Park, which can host them all. They agreed that Dallas should abandon plans for a small-fry boarding facility and build something "world-class." It seemed like a win-win-win, Pitts recalls. Local equestrians would get a high-caliber competition facility in their backyard, the city of Dallas would reap millions in tax revenue from out-of-town competitors and spectators, and a long-ignored part of Dallas would get an injection of economic development.

"If you're going to go into an effort like that and have it be beneficial for that part of town and beneficial to the city of Dallas," Pitts says, "[you want] to build a facility that could attract shows."

They established themselves as a nonprofit, Texas Horse Park Inc., and set to work selling City Hall on their vision. Former City Councilman Craig Holcomb, one of the primary architects of the Trinity project and a backer of the horse park, recalls city staff and council members being immediately receptive. He had no trouble convincing them to ask for more funding -- $14 million this time -- in the 2006 bond program.

And so, what had begun as a nice horse barn and some riding areas had mushroomed into a $100 million equestrian theme park, complete with stalls for several hundred horses, a 100-acre cross-country course, a half-mile racetrack and a sea of parking and RV hookups, to accommodate the trailers and campers that would descend weekly on Pleasant Grove.
No longer was the goal to provide something the surrounding community would find useful, something to complement the neighborhood. This was something that would transform it.

The city and Texas Horse Park Inc. agreed to split the $30 million cost of the first phase. The city's contribution would come from the 2006 bond package, the nonprofit's through private donations. Meanwhile, BRW Architects cashed in: Spread over almost a dozen contract amendments approved by the city over a decade, the firm's contract grew to similarly unrecognizable proportions, ballooning from the initial $500,000 in 2002 to $4.4 million in 2012.

And no matter how the project ballooned, it was politically bulletproof, thanks to that 2006 bond vote. From that point forward, opposition to the horse park, much like the controversial toll road, could -- and in City Council meetings routinely was -- cast as opposition to the will of the people. And because it carried the promise of hundreds of millions of dollars of economic development for Pleasant Grove, opponents could be -- and in City Council meetings routinely were -- accused of being against southern Dallas.

The project gained enough momentum to barrel through multiple roadblocks, chiefly Texas Horse Park Inc.'s failure to raise the money: After five years, it had banked less than $750,000 of its promised $15 million share. The project's supporters maintain that they would have raised the money were it not for the Great Recession. They also claim the local philanthropic community was tapped out after pouring so much money into the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Klyde Warren Park and projects in the Arts District. But to critics like City Councilman Lee Kleinman, who has proposed killing the horse park and using the money to overhaul the city's aquatic centers, the reason was more fundamental: "It signaled to me there wasn't broad community support for the horse park."

Half its funding gone, City Hall could have simply spiked the project. Instead it set aside plans for a sprawling, money-making complex and reworked the horse park as a charity initiative. Planners had always intended to include charity -- therapeutic riding for disabled children and horseback rides for the neighborhood -- as a minor part of the facility. Now this was the entire project, which the city would fund by itself using the $15 million it had set aside. There would be a horse park, but it wouldn't be the utilitarian stables envisioned in 1998, and it wouldn't be the grand equestrian mecca planned after 2006. This would be something in between, neither modest nor world-class.

Another hurdle arose when the city's bid process failed to unearth anyone who wanted to run the horse park. Officials cleared this by abandoning that process and simply signing deals with two local nonprofits: Equest, a well-respected Wylie charity that had been in conversations with the city for a decade, and River Ranch Educational Charities, an obscure nonprofit from McKinney.

Equest would control a small, autonomous section on the facility's southern edge. River Ranch would actually run and maintain the horse park. The deals they signed with the city were generous: 20-plus years of exclusive rights to the property without having to pay a dime in rent. It wasn't until later, well after it was locked into a decades-long partnership with River Ranch, that City Hall would learn more about the troubling past of the nonprofit's founder. The question, then, was what they would do about it.