Will the U.S. Navy Ever Clean Up Hensley Field to Make Way for Master-Planned Community?
Share News:
Very little progress has been made since former District 3 Dallas City Councilman Casey Thomas declared from the horseshoe in December 2022 that a plan for 6,800 new homes in a $390 million master-planned community at Hensley Field would be his “legacy project.”
Those homes have not been built, and the project was inherited by current D3 Councilman Zarin Gracey, who was elected in 2023. Taxpayer money has been spent but it’s going toward legal fees rather than new construction. The problem isn’t a lack of will to house families in southern Dallas. The barrier, according to the City of Dallas, is that the U.S. Navy — a former lessee of the site — is refusing to remediate environmental contamination.
Late last year, the Dallas City Council approved spending up to $850,000 on a lawsuit to force the Navy to clean the contaminated 738-acre Hensley Field, the Dallas Morning News reported on Dec. 24.
Contamination at Hensley Field
The U.S. Navy leased the property at the border of Dallas and Grand Prairie from the City of Dallas in 1949 to operate Naval Air Station Dallas, CandysDirt.com reported in August 2023. The Navy closed the base 50 years later and returned the property to the city.
At that time, contamination existed, “consistent with other U.S. military installations,” according to city officials.
The City filed suit in 2001 and reached a settlement the following year, which mandated the U.S. Navy complete environmental remediation by 2017.
“That deadline was not met,” according to city officials. “While the Navy has made progress and continues to work with the City, the Navy must fulfill its obligation to complete the remediation.”
Dallas officials further alleged that the Navy’s delay on environmental cleanup suspended the city’s redevelopment plans, diminished the site’s market value, and illegally infringed on the city’s property rights.
The latest article in the Dallas Morning News indicates that full remediation still hasn’t happened, meaning there’s no telling when the highly-anticipated housing development near Mountain Creek Lake will break ground.
The plan for Hensley Field approved in late 2022 called for a transformation of the former airfield into a mixed-use neighborhood with parks, waterfront trails, shops, restaurants, a marina, a school, and a film studio.
The City of Dallas and the U.S. Navy have said they cannot comment on pending litigation.
A Glimmer of Hope
We thought an announcement could be forthcoming when we saw a social media photo in April 2024 of the Dallas economic development team in a Chinook touring the Hensley Field site with Navy officials.
Instead, however, we got a bunch of “no comments” and speculation that a definitive answer about the future of Hensley Field would come in the summer.
“We’re still in the process of trying to get the area cleaned up and I think we’re getting pretty close to that,” Councilman Gracey told CandysDirt.com in April. “Hopefully we’ll have some definitive answers by June. I don’t think there’s anything to hide or anything like that. We’ve been working closely with [the Navy] to get that resolved. We’re all working together.”
Summer came and went with no answers as negotiations between the City and the Navy appeared to continue. An updated status report was due on Dec. 13, according to the Dallas Morning News report, but we haven’t seen that either. The case could go to trial if an agreement can’t be reached.
“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,” according to the DMN. “City officials in 2022 said the Navy had spent $92.4 million in cleanup 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 reportedly responded to the City’s lawsuit in May 2024 by saying it shouldn’t be held to “performance under the 2002 settlement agreement on grounds of impracticability or impossibility.”
