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PLANS TO ‘PAVE PARADISE AND PUT UP A PARKING LOT’

Chihuly was the biggest thing ever to happen to the arboretum. World-renowned blown-glass artist Dale Chihuly began creating sculptures for botanical settings in 2001, mostly in conservatories. The arboretum became the second all-outdoor host to Chihuly’s work, and the success of the first exhibit in Atlanta almost guaranteed massive crowds the arboretum had yet to experience — so large, in fact, that arboretum officials worried on-site parking and its overflow lot wouldn’t be enough.

As a solution, the arboretum asked the Park Board to use Winfrey Point, northwest of the arboretum in White Rock Lake Park, as a temporary overflow lot during the exhibit.

White Rock Lake residents were not consulted — neither the nearby neighborhood associations nor the White Rock Lake Task Force, a group of stakeholders. Jung chairs the task force, and “our first notice of the proposal for the arboretum to park at Winfrey Point came when it was presented to the task force a week after the Park Board had already approved the contract,” he says.

Soon after this news broke, White Rock

Lake activists Hal and Ted Barker began uncovering documents, even drawings, that suggested the Dallas Park Department and the arboretum were planning to turn part of Winfrey Point into a parking lot the arboretum would construct and manage, and the city could use when weekend crowds and events overran the meager parking available at the lake.

The 25-year ceasefire suddenly ended. The arboretum had seemingly stepped outside the fence — with the blessing of the city —and it sparked an all-out revolt.

Residents and environmentalists descended on Winfrey Point with picket signs. Schoolchildren were summoned to comb the grasses for birds’ nests. Even East Dallas Councilman Sheffie Kadane donned a “Save Winfrey Point” T-shirt.

Jung, a self-described conservative Republican, dug through his closet, pulled out his yapping dog T-shirt from ’87 and wore it to his first-ever protest.

The arboretum, which had been slapped with a lawsuit to block the plans, remained mum for three days at its lawyers’ insistence, then released a list of myths and facts regarding Winfrey Point and the parking lot plans.

It was too late. Protestors singing Joni Mitchell’s environmental anthem “Big Yellow Taxi” drowned out everything else. Plans for both temporary and permanent parking on Winfrey Point were dead. Protesters were elated: David had beaten Goliath.

The two sides still disagree on some of the finer points — environmentalists insist Winfrey Point is pristine Blackland prairie; the arboretum sees it as a field overgrown with invasive species. Detractors believe the arboretum intended to smother Winfrey Point in concrete; the arboretum defends its vision as “minimally invasive” parking on a small, obscure part of the field, and native plants and interpretive trails on the rest of the land.

Some neighbors argue the arboretum wants to act unilaterally with no regard for neighbors; the arboretum maintains that hundreds of people in the surrounding neighborhoods are arboretum volunteers and hundreds more are members, and the vocal minority doesn’t speak for the whole.

Skeptics accuse the arboretum of trying to conceal its plans; the arboretum says that concepts are not plans, and any changes to the planned development district will always require public input and city approval.

The underlying issue, though, is no different than it was in the ’80s — White Rock Lake.

The tensions and suspicions that simmered under the surface for 25 years were dredged up, and a new generation of lake lovers found themselves facing off against the arboretum.

“Inside the fence, you’ve got this highly cultivated illustration of humans’ ma- nipulation of nature, still controversial to some,” Jung says. “Outside, the park is preserved in more or less its natural state with a pretty strong consensus behind that approach, and now come to find out the inside-the-fence people want to put a large additional chunk outside of the fence, inside the fence. You could see where that would inflame some passions.”

‘IT WAS JUST A DRAWING’

Mary Brinegar, the arboretum’s president and CEO for the past 19 years, wasn’t formally involved with the arboretum in 1987 when the first battle broke out, but she knows the history.

Brinegar, much like former board chairman Ralph Rogers, can be a polarizing figure. People seem to either adore or abhor her, depending on their views of the arboretum, because she is the driving force for what it has become.

And what the arboretum is not, Brinegar says, is a land grabber.

“We’re not into eminent domain. We’re not into taking anything,” she says of the Winfrey Point parking issue.

“We were in the early stages of ‘what if?’ To even have it be a consideration, there had to be a drawing, but it was just a drawing, and it was just the beginning of an idea.

“The fear that some people had is we would go forward with it without them having a chance to say anything about it,” she says. “It was never the intent. We were so far away from ever seeing it fly.”

The arboretum does nothing in a hurry, Brinegar says, because it wants to do everything with the utmost quality. The most recent example is the children’s garden, which took 17 years from the time it was dreamed up to the day it opened. Everything starts with plans and studies, Brinegar says, and “then you go back and say, ‘Now, how do you feel about it?’ ” Winfrey Point would have been no different.

“We’re sensitive to how people feel about the lake,” Brinegar says, “but we are not here to try to take over anything unless people want us to help.”

The arboretum thought it could improve Winfrey Point, just as it has spent the last three decades trying to improve everything in its care, Brinegar says. Pro-

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